Louis Castle, co-creator of Command & Conquer, led the Relentless Studios team at Amazon that made the team shooter Crucible.
Amazon spent five years developing Crucible, the free-to-play team shooter game that launches on the PC today.
The competitive multiplayer game lets players choose from a diverse roster of aliens, humans, and robots to battle on the planet Crucible, where they can collect the resource Essence while avoiding death from fellow hunters and the environment.
Louis Castle, cofounder of Westwood Studios and co-creator of games such as Command & Conquer, joined Amazon in 2017, and he runs the Relentless Studios game studio at Amazon in Seattle. Relentless made Crucible, which has elements of multiplayer games such as Blizzard’s Overwatch, Riot’s Valorant, and even Call of Duty.
The game debuts with three models: Heart of the Hives (4 vs.4), where players battle big bosses and capture their hearts to win; Alpha Hunters, eight teams of two players each in a final team standing match; and Harvester Command, where players capture and hold spots on a map. I talked with Castle about how Amazon made the game and the thinking behind its design. We’ll find out soon if those decisions resonate with players who are eager to play new games while in lockdown.
The game was originally scheduled to come out in March, but Amazon decided to push the launch back to May 20 so the team could deal with the pandemic’s disruption as they were finishing up the title, Castle said. Castle said the game was made from the beginning to be watchable, and all eyes are going to be on this first major PC game release from Amazon.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: I was chatting with a developer who said this project started about four years ago?
Castle: It’s a little difficult to pin it down. The game started about five years ago, but it’s gone through some pretty big changes. It was announced before I joined the company at a TwitchCon in September 2016. When I came on board we had a playable version, and we had a community group already put together,100 people or so. It was quite a good number. From the very beginnings, when it was barely stood up as a playable prototype, it’s always had community guidance.
When I came to Amazon it was the project that resonated with me as being customer-obsessed, the way Amazon likes to be. It’s one of the things that attracted me to Crucible. All the leadership is tied into community. It’s been built hand in hand with a bunch of advisors.
GamesBeat: How big would you say the team was when you got there? Were you going in just to run the game, or more to manage a larger studio?
Castle: The quick answer is we’re not supposed to give exact sizes of teams. But it’s smaller than teams that would be working on competitive titles in the same space. It’s nowhere near some of the larger teams I’ve worked with in my career. It’s a relatively small, scrappy team.
GamesBeat: Was it a prototyping team or a production team at that point?
Castle: When I came on board there were two groups at Amazon.
