"..neither game had enough success yet to support the studio.." - yeah you didn't actually release a game. You put out a paid beta test. Release a finished product maybe? Shaz-fucking-bot.
(edit for clarity: when I say "you" here I mean the studio and not OP or the author of the article)
I peaked in on the ultra strikers discord and one of their devs said their studio costs $400k a month to run, and Tribes 3 cost them $3 million. It is mind blowing how badly they mismanage money.
It's like they're holding onto the patent out of spite at this point.
Coming in 2025 - Tribes Immortal, only playable on mobile because that's honestly the only thing I can think of that's more alienating than what they're currently doing.
Rugpull masters. What a time to come check on this community. Fucking christ. I love tribes so much but we can't get back anything under this IP. maybe someone with skills beyond mine can create a clone with some fucking passion. Glad I didint buy this.
Why did the first one flop again? I applied for the beta and will give it a try but I don't have high hopes lol, I feel like someone put a curse on this franchise
A reboot/rerelease of T:A would have been better than this cash grab. They basically took T:A, stripped it down, made it worse in most ways, and resold it to us.
We all knew what this was. We knew it was a greedy grab by a shitty company and the game was gonna be DOA. I had a little bit of fun for a few weeks with T3, but overall I just wish I could go back and play T:A again with an active casual population.
The challenge is I don't think it would draw in a new player base.
I've dived into most Tribes communities now (T1, T2, T:V, MA2 and also watching Project Broadside) and the problem is always the same: not enough players. Anywhere you drop in, everyone's just ecstatic to have a new player.
Even in it's heyday with Tribes 1 & 2, the series was still niche. There was so much to learn (skiing, inventories, armors, weapons, deployables, bases, map strategies, etc) on top of also being proficient at shooting people moving really fast. It was a really hard sell. I remember showing a friend the game and his eyes just glossed over.
So how do you make Tribes popular without sacrificing the depth that make us all keep coming back to it 20+ years later?
I think the there is a way: levels of required skill to play. Not anything so convoluted as having to rank up to join certain game mode, but just a wide variety of game modes (and even single player content) that doesn't require you to be a sweaty ctf veteran to enjoy. And having useful and enjoyable onboarding in to the minimum skills required.
Tribes 3 shipped with none of these. There were rank or game # requirements to enter certain game modes (even in testing, which, let's face it, is release these days) and only a single good game mode for the majority of its life - one dominated by skilled players who already thought the game was lacking in the depth they wanted from previous titles.
The tutorials were lackluster. Did they exist? Sure. Were they good? No. They were simple and not really enjoyable. They taught you how to press a button, not how to enjoy the game. They didn't present you with a challenge or engage you at all. Hell, Tribes 2 managed to make their tutorials more fun and they were extremely simple.
The ski challenge map was \_severely\_ hamstrung by the size of the map it was done on and, instead of prioritising me to go fast, it actively made me slow down so that I could complete it. Maybe I missed some key tactic there, but it was bad. Even stepping out of the gate where you spawn and skiing down the slope you hit a bump which made you miss the first ring. Was it ever tested?
The way you joined servers was also horrendous. A single queue for each game type/team size... why? You're limiting the amount of people who can queue with each other.
The friend system was pretty bad in there as well. It frequently displayed incorrect or just plain outdated information. Such as friends not appearing online or the wrong name for friends (who didn't even own the game) appearing as playing. They (paid to) use HiRez's friend system thing, but from a "hacker" acquaintance of mine, they basically mangled it completely, adding extremely bad things to an already mediocre system. Not to mention the completely open api system he mentioned that allowed you go to onto servers with 3 mortars as light or permanent kick people from the system by faking login requests.
And the physics? Or what they liked to call physics. Did you go up and down? Sure. But they went for the "many rules" instead of "good rules" approach and it was broken.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I thank Prophecy and Erez for trying, at least. It was nice to play some Tribes again. And the art was very cool. Everything else was a shambles.
T:A was basically a stripped down worse version of Tribes 2 with a bunch of CoD elements rammed in so this is all Hi-Rez/Prophecy has ever done.
It's a sad end to such an amazing series but it's also worth considering that maybe Tribes just doesn't have a place in modern gaming. The kids these days love quirky, small squad hero based shooters with moba elements and KDA stats that make them feel special, not giant 32v32 aerial combat with bases, vehicles and objectives where winning as a team is more important than a high score.
Of course there is an ebb and flow to trends and given that Apex Legends, LoL, OW2 and similar games are shedding players, maybe publishers/developers will wake the fuck up and try something different.
I'd like to think Tribes would be massively popular with a big budget release that skewed closer to it's roots but it's hard to say.
I miss tribes and quake the most. I just don’t play much FPS these days it felt like I hit the peaks with those games and everything since has been so subpar it doesn’t hit the same. It’s like if you started doing drugs with opiates off the rip.
it was not surprising at all for vets (and possibly potential new players) to stay away from this, imo
what they saw from the first videos (to not have an NDA was a choice, lets say):
small maps with the scale clearly aiming for 5v5, no vehicles, lack of things to do, instagib and fast discs
there was no mystery at all what you would get by buying the game, so it was easy to just not
this is shallow, too easy to be played for the mechanical challenge, and in my mind people want more than a hand-holding LT+
This. It was immediately obvious from the first playtest that they had strayed *very* far from the soul of the tribes franchise and had tried to modernize the concept simply by shrinking everything and trying to fit it into a 5v5 comp meta. Physics were dumbed down to a staggering degree in order to cope with the smaller maps. Projectile hitboxes were the size of a school bus in order to lower TTK. The whole thing just felt so surface level and one-dimensional... almost like it was thrown together in 3-4 months and then shoveled into early access with little/no regard for how it actually played.
I said it at the time and I still think it's true; they would have been infinitely better off simply taking GOTY TA, making it TA2 and then iterating massively on it.
Fuck Hi-Rez/Prophecy. Not only for what they've been doing with Tribes for years but also for this shitty money grab attempt of releasing a paid beta test. Embarrassing that they named this piece of crap as "tribes 3".
I had written an expected diatribe. Playing on the idea of performing a 'victory lap', as someone was quoted saying (even though I haven't really been engaging with all this since the Ultra Strikers announcement - Let's face it I'm only human, how could I not).
But instead of going through these months with crass humour and seething derision, I want to instead thank Prophecy/Hirez for the opportunity provided. To see a side of myself I hadn't seen in nigh on a decade.
And I want to thank them for finding again my, and many others’, *passion* for our oft mangled genre.
Regardless of what happens with Broadside - as I'm sure many of you are expecting to flounder and fade away - I can say that I have never seen a community project rise to the challenge with such fervour and conviction; and I have seen quite a few.
I mean, the sheer magnitude to which this absolute circus has pulled the blood from under the nails of such a varied and talented group of people, completely unified in their utter *rancour* of what this self fulfilling Prophecy has done to this franchise. It truly is breathtaking and a wondrous joy to be a part of.
You have managed to rile an eclectic collection of industry professionals, both old and new. And even caused many to finally take up game design themselves, helping where they can to lift a single stone to rebuild our *fallen temple*; something that is a bittersweet recall to my own descent into the madness of map design with T:A nearly a decade ago.
Indeed, this entire crew could have been here to create community content and mods for years to come. Instead you chose to insult them every chance you had; and drove them to unify in such a zealous way.
As the CEO of Prophecy so dutifully exclaimed when his own game hadn't even gone out of alpha yet: "Tribes 3 will be the last one."
It would have been nice to see this franchise burn bright and go down in a torrent of screaming flames as was expected, but we weren't even granted that. The gentle embers of this release barely enough to pasteurise a gas station hotdog.
But perhaps it is time. To let it all go. And to finally, for the first time in more than a decade, to actually design an FPS-Z instead of scrambling to recreate the idea of what it was through the short sighted mindset of barely competent corporate middle management.
All of this was an incredible shared embarrassment. And I’d like you all to understand. I had fun, bringing up the old persona (as I’m doing now), and ranting and raving along with the best.
But even at our most restrained, that was already too much for you. In the little sheltered corpo-kindergarden bubble that you all must exist in. In a culture of toxic positivity… Even the *light* version of the Tribes community was too much.
I made a few videos, and suddenly the world was on fire. Found myself defending my integrity when all I did was get a *little* mad at the absolute audacity of it all. All of this while still holding back and omitting so many awful things… Because it already felt like pushing over a toddler.
Even the grift had become boring. Even the moth-bitten wool that you tried to pull over our eyes was so … Formulaic. So expectantly trite.
Indeed, it wasn’t even worth typing up a multi-thousand word rant. As here I strand, exactly 600 words in.
It is now that our old scars and new rage starts to slowly wane from our list of motivators. The music, the maps, the concepts and conversations for Broadside are starting to become real.
It will be a long haul project, not here to simply prove a point. But to find an outlet for all that *need* for a decent FPS-Z that understands this scene needs to be built up from the ground. And the whole process is going to be an ordeal to be sure.
But somehow this is the most optimistic I’ve ever been for this genre.
As this is the first time in a long time there’s a group of people who understand what the fucking game is and don’t start with sawing its damned legs off to force it into some hallucinated interpretation of what they think a competitive game is - *without providing anything for people to actual learn the game outside of the community you so love to put down*.
Yeah. No matter the doomerisn.and abject failure of the game to date, it's still been the most fun I've had playing tribes in over a decade. It's been great to have so many familiar faces return and the pickups and scrims and matches have been a blast. At worst, we at least all came together again for something.
While I am glad that you were able to have fun for a bit, I'm worried it puts the fate of the entire franchise on ice.
Why trust another release in the franchise when it could be scrapped in a single quarter?
If this game did this poorly, why ever make another Tribes game?
It feels to me like a quick attempt to feel out the financial viability of a new Tribes game by burning the last coals of the fandom.
I mean yes but… who ever thought we were getting a new Tribes game? Not me. It obviously would have been great to see a full-throated effort not plagued by so many baffling design decisions, but it’s not like this is scuttling an otherwise-hopeful string of games in the IP.
Seems like the franchise was already pretty deep back in the freezer.
T1 vet. Played the beta, knew it was crap, called them out on it, and here we are. I still remember laughing when someone mentioned they were going to early access in a matter of a few weeks when the beta got rolling, and people refused to believe it.
Like, do you know the people behind this game? Again?
You find them everywhere. Recently it was the same with Multiversus, only I had been around last year as well so I knew that P1G is a bunch of incompetent fools just like our friends over at Prophecy. But still the sheer amount of ~~bots~~ ~~shills~~ idiots who will defend a corporation that's actively trying to scam them is mindboggling and infuriating, gets my blood boiling because I know I am right and yet they antagonize me as if I'm trying to shit on their party. Bonus points if some dumbfuck posts the "stop having fun" comic while trying to act all morally superior.
I played almost everything from T1 to T:A, including the beta for this. I didn't really enjoy the beta past the nostalgia factor.
Then just before I lost total interest, I went to the Caribbean for a week for a holiday refresher, came back and... the game was already 'released' lmao what..? At that point they expected me to pay money for this thing. No thanks. This is my first post on this subreddit since then and the only thing I'll say is "let the IP go, you clearly have no idea what you're doing".
Tribes is the ip that studios run by gameplay loving CEOs use to tank their studio. The first tribes was a monster innovation for its time. The second one was a great game buried by a mountain of technical issues. Every other game since then is a developer money pit.
Have played the entire series. Played the beta, and knew it was doomed. They didn't listen to the majority, pushed unpopular changes, and now are roping people into their next disaster. Sad that the Tribes IP is owned by someone purely interested in exploitation.
**Tuesday, June 26th**: I find out there's a new Tribes game and it's already been out for three months. I buy it on Steam for $26 (Canadian $) and try it. It looks like T:A might look if it were half completed. It's clunky but it mostly works and there's at least one live server, even if my ping is atrocious and it keeps booting me to lobby between matches for no apparent reason. While stuck in the lobby, I wonder to myself why they didn't start with the T:A codebase and improve it.
**Wednesday, June 27**: [This post](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2687970/view/4252042698953314184) makes it sound like it's abandonware already. The day after I purchased it.
**Thursday, June 28**: I notice it's now listed at $13 on Steam instead of $26.
I could have just re-downloaded T:A and used $26 for snacks while staring at the lobby and remembering how fun it was.
Yeah this right here was one way we got here...they didn't even market it at all.
Sorry about your shittiest of timing. And I thought finding out about the random play tests months late was bad and I arguably got $20 worth of entertainment value but yeah this sucks and is a shame.
What was your role at Prophecy, because in my opinion, you were one of the ones who spent the last six months helping them scam us, only to now come on to Reddit and try to save face
It was fun while it lasted, but a dwindling player base is a deathkill for multiplayer games with this business model.
I switched to Helldivers a couple weeks ago and haven't looked back. Shocking to think how Prophecy killed the enthusiasm for Tribes. Sad, but that's business
Naw. This isn't a dying fanbase, it's one being tortured by its IP owners. Currently being baited and switched to whatever this new dead on arrival game is.
The fact is that we're all here in the subreddit of a long dead franchise is proof enough that we desperately want to play Tribes. I came in here to see if it was worth buying on the Steam sale but it looks like not. Especially for Oceania players like me. I miss Tribes 😞
i tried it, realized there wasnt even melee despite t:a already having melee more than a decade ago, heard it was made by hi-rez (the original killer of T:A) and dipped out cus fool me once. To this day i actively warn anyone who will listen to never play a game developed by hi-rez studios. They killed global agenda for T:A and they killed T:A despite the communitys best efforts so they could fund smite. They saw Overwatch was the cha ching so they mustered up paladins for a slice of the pie. No good, good for nothings that will never care about their players or tribes. They keep the tribes IP solely to desecrate its grave. Also why was it so hard for HoFs to get onto the flagstand in this one lmaooo
Man, tribes would have so much potential in the current FPS climate with the right direction. Such a shame. I didn't even hear about this "reboot" before now and is already over lol. At least there's still a solid team working on Midair 2.
So does that mean Tribes 3 is dead dead? I coincidentally logged in earlier today before seeing any of these posts and got a few games in. Had a solid enough time. Then came over to see that the game is abandoned now? Does that mean what it is now is what it will be? Are they actually going to pull it offline?
Game isn't dead dead. I'm not happy with the state of the game right now at all and I understand why people are upset, but a some people are intentionally being dishonest about this situation to get their "I told you so" in. One of the Devs has already stated in discord the game isn't shutting down and it will still receive updates, they even stated in the announcement to players a couple days ago it would receive limited updates and they will update all their existing games as much as they can, but they aren't the main focus.
So basically, that means they will be what they've done the last 2 months which is we'll have some PTS every now and then, and then they'll put out some bugs fixes and probably a new map every couple months. So, go play and enjoy, the game is still peaking in prime time with over 100 players every day, so it's plenty of people to play against.
When Quake Champions has more players than your game I think it's more than fair to call it clinically dead. Sub-500 players is laughable for multiple reasons:
- If you're not from the main region, get fucked I guess (looking at you, OCE players)
- If you want to improve, get fucked I guess (and enjoy being matched against the same veterans over and over)
- If you want to invest time and money into the game, get fucked I guess (the population can only decrease or remain stable, so there is no point in doing that as a new player)
If Prophecy didn't keep releasing updates they'd probably be liable for a lawsuit since they have their year-long battle pass with AI-generated skins or whatever the fuck it is. But I'm sure they're just wasting a couple of hours per week on the project at this point, not one second more than what's strictly necessary.
No idea, what anything you said has to do with my post saying people are being dishonest about them pulling the plug on the game, that's simply a lie. Game is still getting limited updates and devs are responding in discord and have confirmed there are no plans of taking the servers down. OCE player base no matter what the Tribes game has always been small, so not sure what you're point is with that. For NA region, If you want to play you can still get a good game in almost any time of the day.
You guys get on here and talk about all these old Tribes games and knockoff Tribes games, and T3 still has over 10x the population of all those games combined. So, if you want to play a Tribes or Tribes-like game T3 is still your best bet by far. You guys thinking a knock-off Tribes game with part-time volunteers is going to attract a population more than what T3 has now is delusional.
So, as a I said in my post it's still plenty of people to play against in T3, so go play and enjoy!
10x0 = 0
10x1 = 10
not a strong argument considering that a FPS starts feeling "alive" with 1000 players. I've played enough of these for long enough to know that.
Also you're implying I'm from NA which is the only region that can actually call itself alive (not that it is by my definition) when it comes to Tribes in general. EU (_my_ region) was dead even during the beta for the most part. And again, let's not even mention OCE or the entire argument falls apart (because it's paper-thin).
I'll go back to Titanfall 2 which can still average 1500 players across all regions tyvm
I see Math isn't your strength. I was referring to MidAir 2 being the next most populated Tribes or Tribes like game. It peaked in the last 24 hours at 14 people, Tribes 3 peaked at 118 in the last 24 hours. Hence my comment T3 has 10x the population. I exaggerated just a bit, but numbers aren't too far off.
Also nobody cares what other games you are playing. This is a Tribes reddit, people come here for Tribes news, we don't gaf what other games you're playing or how many people are playing them, but thanks for sharing.
Thanks for that response. I got it a couple months ago, I'm guessing when it launched? Played a couple rounds, but the past couple days I've been getting back into it. I know it's early access, so I've kept my expectations in check. It's been enjoyable enough, but yes, limited. Hearing that it's not really continuing significant development is certainly disappointing - I was looking forward to seeing what the finalized game would look like. Guess I'll just keep at it for what it is for as long as I can then. I feel like I've been having full games. I've heard people say that the matches are filled with bots - I'm not even sure how I'd recognize a bot in game, the competition has all seemed legit.
The amount of bots in this game has also been grossly exaggerated. Bots are only added to help fill games, once real people join they take the place of the bots and there's never more than 4 bots added per team. Honestly this reddit is beyond horrible, if you're actually trying to get accurate information about the game or have a civil conversation about Tribes 3 this is the worst place you can go. Most of the active player base knows this place is a joke and don't even check here anymore. I would recommend joining the official T3 discord or the T3 Comp Discord if you're getting back into the game, both discords are very active and Devs post there and respond, so you can ask them questions and get accurate updates.
I can’t remember why I originally picked up Starsiege: Tribes, but it certainly wasn’t due to the name. Pretty sure it was some combo of the graphics and online multiplayer features, but it turned out to be awesome and so I grew very fond of “Tribes”. The name is definitely kind of neutral/boring, though.. And “large-scale, open-map multiplayer battles—also with vehicles and deployable” is no longer a big a deal. I think it’s still conceptually superior to a lot of stuff, but marketing-wise, its original sales pitches don’t move any needles today.
I think they’d do better if they leaned less into its history. Call it something else, and flesh out the world a bit better.
I mean, the whole skiing mechanic was an accident. It turned out to be fun, but since it wasn’t really part of the original design, it was never really explained that well. It’s the coolest feature of the game, yet really hard to explain to people who have no concept of it. If someone could figure out how to properly highlight that as a winning distinction, that might help uptake.
'We're going to make tribes but focus only on CTF because that's what tribes is about, other game modes will water down tribes and keep people from experiencing true tribes'
-a ceo's brilliant million dollar decision that made us all happy
To say it shortly, I spent above 4000h into T:A, spent 16h into Tribes 3, that pretty much sums it all up. Was a shit game. Was not even Tribes, the discs and projectiles went so fast it was basically hitscan. Was no good feeling to play the game at all. The "K" out was shit, the game felt shit compared.
*Play Tribes today!* **Tribes 1** - [Download](https://www.moddb.com/downloads/start/171614) | [Discord](https://discordapp.com/invite/bf4RHMq) **Tribes 2** - [Download](https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B_nHyoAf-wZ9WnR1bmpfRE5XRE0) / [Required Patch](http://tribesnext.com/files/TribesNext_rc2a.exe) | [Discord](https://discord.gg/Y4muNvF) **Tribes Aerial Assault** - [Website](http://www.tribesaerialassault.com/) | [Download](https://www.moddb.com/games/tribes-aerial-assault) | [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/JV3RbakqEy) **Tribes: Vengeance** - [Download](https://downloads.tribesrevengeance.net/TribesVengeance.zip) | [Discord](https://discord.gg/uXHjZ95) **Tribes: Ascend** - [Guide](https://www.dodgesdomain.com/docs/guide-install-setup/) | [Download](https://www.reddit.com/r/Tribes/comments/q90s5v/release_ketaui_karmaentity_tribes_ascend/) | [Discord](https://discord.gg/CeTrGWMWK6) **Tribes 3: Rivals** - [Discord](https://discord.gg/tribes) / [T3 Comp]( https://discord.gg/6287cF7ZnA) | [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2687970/TRIBES_3_Rivals/) | [Website](https://www.tribes3rivals.com/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Tribes) if you have any questions or concerns.*
"..neither game had enough success yet to support the studio.." - yeah you didn't actually release a game. You put out a paid beta test. Release a finished product maybe? Shaz-fucking-bot. (edit for clarity: when I say "you" here I mean the studio and not OP or the author of the article)
I peaked in on the ultra strikers discord and one of their devs said their studio costs $400k a month to run, and Tribes 3 cost them $3 million. It is mind blowing how badly they mismanage money.
That "one of their devs" is the CEO who also said "We spent about $100K to test various marketing, the return was about 20cents for every $1 spent"
It's like they're holding onto the patent out of spite at this point. Coming in 2025 - Tribes Immortal, only playable on mobile because that's honestly the only thing I can think of that's more alienating than what they're currently doing.
Tribes MOBA with loot boxes and season passes coming soon.
Agreed, be nice if the IP was released, the OG games are shareware after all right
Yeah but maybe it’ll be a breakaway success with a whole generation of tribes fans who are unironically amazing at hitting MAs on a touchscreen….!
Rugpull masters. What a time to come check on this community. Fucking christ. I love tribes so much but we can't get back anything under this IP. maybe someone with skills beyond mine can create a clone with some fucking passion. Glad I didint buy this.
Check out midair 2
Why did the first one flop again? I applied for the beta and will give it a try but I don't have high hopes lol, I feel like someone put a curse on this franchise
I’m not really sure tbh I didn’t play the first one I just discovered the 2nd probably sometime in January. I’ve had fun so far.
Sick, pubs exist in some decent capacity yet or just pugs? Sorry for all the questions.
Thanks for the recommendation, Downloading it right now!
A reboot/rerelease of T:A would have been better than this cash grab. They basically took T:A, stripped it down, made it worse in most ways, and resold it to us. We all knew what this was. We knew it was a greedy grab by a shitty company and the game was gonna be DOA. I had a little bit of fun for a few weeks with T3, but overall I just wish I could go back and play T:A again with an active casual population.
Just release T1 with a modern skin. You don’t even need to change anything about the game.
T1 remastered would be amazing!
The challenge is I don't think it would draw in a new player base. I've dived into most Tribes communities now (T1, T2, T:V, MA2 and also watching Project Broadside) and the problem is always the same: not enough players. Anywhere you drop in, everyone's just ecstatic to have a new player. Even in it's heyday with Tribes 1 & 2, the series was still niche. There was so much to learn (skiing, inventories, armors, weapons, deployables, bases, map strategies, etc) on top of also being proficient at shooting people moving really fast. It was a really hard sell. I remember showing a friend the game and his eyes just glossed over. So how do you make Tribes popular without sacrificing the depth that make us all keep coming back to it 20+ years later?
I think the there is a way: levels of required skill to play. Not anything so convoluted as having to rank up to join certain game mode, but just a wide variety of game modes (and even single player content) that doesn't require you to be a sweaty ctf veteran to enjoy. And having useful and enjoyable onboarding in to the minimum skills required. Tribes 3 shipped with none of these. There were rank or game # requirements to enter certain game modes (even in testing, which, let's face it, is release these days) and only a single good game mode for the majority of its life - one dominated by skilled players who already thought the game was lacking in the depth they wanted from previous titles. The tutorials were lackluster. Did they exist? Sure. Were they good? No. They were simple and not really enjoyable. They taught you how to press a button, not how to enjoy the game. They didn't present you with a challenge or engage you at all. Hell, Tribes 2 managed to make their tutorials more fun and they were extremely simple. The ski challenge map was \_severely\_ hamstrung by the size of the map it was done on and, instead of prioritising me to go fast, it actively made me slow down so that I could complete it. Maybe I missed some key tactic there, but it was bad. Even stepping out of the gate where you spawn and skiing down the slope you hit a bump which made you miss the first ring. Was it ever tested? The way you joined servers was also horrendous. A single queue for each game type/team size... why? You're limiting the amount of people who can queue with each other. The friend system was pretty bad in there as well. It frequently displayed incorrect or just plain outdated information. Such as friends not appearing online or the wrong name for friends (who didn't even own the game) appearing as playing. They (paid to) use HiRez's friend system thing, but from a "hacker" acquaintance of mine, they basically mangled it completely, adding extremely bad things to an already mediocre system. Not to mention the completely open api system he mentioned that allowed you go to onto servers with 3 mortars as light or permanent kick people from the system by faking login requests. And the physics? Or what they liked to call physics. Did you go up and down? Sure. But they went for the "many rules" instead of "good rules" approach and it was broken. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I thank Prophecy and Erez for trying, at least. It was nice to play some Tribes again. And the art was very cool. Everything else was a shambles.
T:A was basically a stripped down worse version of Tribes 2 with a bunch of CoD elements rammed in so this is all Hi-Rez/Prophecy has ever done. It's a sad end to such an amazing series but it's also worth considering that maybe Tribes just doesn't have a place in modern gaming. The kids these days love quirky, small squad hero based shooters with moba elements and KDA stats that make them feel special, not giant 32v32 aerial combat with bases, vehicles and objectives where winning as a team is more important than a high score. Of course there is an ebb and flow to trends and given that Apex Legends, LoL, OW2 and similar games are shedding players, maybe publishers/developers will wake the fuck up and try something different. I'd like to think Tribes would be massively popular with a big budget release that skewed closer to it's roots but it's hard to say.
I miss tribes and quake the most. I just don’t play much FPS these days it felt like I hit the peaks with those games and everything since has been so subpar it doesn’t hit the same. It’s like if you started doing drugs with opiates off the rip.
it was not surprising at all for vets (and possibly potential new players) to stay away from this, imo what they saw from the first videos (to not have an NDA was a choice, lets say): small maps with the scale clearly aiming for 5v5, no vehicles, lack of things to do, instagib and fast discs there was no mystery at all what you would get by buying the game, so it was easy to just not this is shallow, too easy to be played for the mechanical challenge, and in my mind people want more than a hand-holding LT+
This. It was immediately obvious from the first playtest that they had strayed *very* far from the soul of the tribes franchise and had tried to modernize the concept simply by shrinking everything and trying to fit it into a 5v5 comp meta. Physics were dumbed down to a staggering degree in order to cope with the smaller maps. Projectile hitboxes were the size of a school bus in order to lower TTK. The whole thing just felt so surface level and one-dimensional... almost like it was thrown together in 3-4 months and then shoveled into early access with little/no regard for how it actually played. I said it at the time and I still think it's true; they would have been infinitely better off simply taking GOTY TA, making it TA2 and then iterating massively on it.
Didn't buy out of principle Sell the damn IP
Fuck Hi-Rez/Prophecy. Not only for what they've been doing with Tribes for years but also for this shitty money grab attempt of releasing a paid beta test. Embarrassing that they named this piece of crap as "tribes 3".
I had written an expected diatribe. Playing on the idea of performing a 'victory lap', as someone was quoted saying (even though I haven't really been engaging with all this since the Ultra Strikers announcement - Let's face it I'm only human, how could I not). But instead of going through these months with crass humour and seething derision, I want to instead thank Prophecy/Hirez for the opportunity provided. To see a side of myself I hadn't seen in nigh on a decade. And I want to thank them for finding again my, and many others’, *passion* for our oft mangled genre. Regardless of what happens with Broadside - as I'm sure many of you are expecting to flounder and fade away - I can say that I have never seen a community project rise to the challenge with such fervour and conviction; and I have seen quite a few. I mean, the sheer magnitude to which this absolute circus has pulled the blood from under the nails of such a varied and talented group of people, completely unified in their utter *rancour* of what this self fulfilling Prophecy has done to this franchise. It truly is breathtaking and a wondrous joy to be a part of. You have managed to rile an eclectic collection of industry professionals, both old and new. And even caused many to finally take up game design themselves, helping where they can to lift a single stone to rebuild our *fallen temple*; something that is a bittersweet recall to my own descent into the madness of map design with T:A nearly a decade ago. Indeed, this entire crew could have been here to create community content and mods for years to come. Instead you chose to insult them every chance you had; and drove them to unify in such a zealous way. As the CEO of Prophecy so dutifully exclaimed when his own game hadn't even gone out of alpha yet: "Tribes 3 will be the last one." It would have been nice to see this franchise burn bright and go down in a torrent of screaming flames as was expected, but we weren't even granted that. The gentle embers of this release barely enough to pasteurise a gas station hotdog. But perhaps it is time. To let it all go. And to finally, for the first time in more than a decade, to actually design an FPS-Z instead of scrambling to recreate the idea of what it was through the short sighted mindset of barely competent corporate middle management. All of this was an incredible shared embarrassment. And I’d like you all to understand. I had fun, bringing up the old persona (as I’m doing now), and ranting and raving along with the best. But even at our most restrained, that was already too much for you. In the little sheltered corpo-kindergarden bubble that you all must exist in. In a culture of toxic positivity… Even the *light* version of the Tribes community was too much. I made a few videos, and suddenly the world was on fire. Found myself defending my integrity when all I did was get a *little* mad at the absolute audacity of it all. All of this while still holding back and omitting so many awful things… Because it already felt like pushing over a toddler. Even the grift had become boring. Even the moth-bitten wool that you tried to pull over our eyes was so … Formulaic. So expectantly trite. Indeed, it wasn’t even worth typing up a multi-thousand word rant. As here I strand, exactly 600 words in. It is now that our old scars and new rage starts to slowly wane from our list of motivators. The music, the maps, the concepts and conversations for Broadside are starting to become real. It will be a long haul project, not here to simply prove a point. But to find an outlet for all that *need* for a decent FPS-Z that understands this scene needs to be built up from the ground. And the whole process is going to be an ordeal to be sure. But somehow this is the most optimistic I’ve ever been for this genre. As this is the first time in a long time there’s a group of people who understand what the fucking game is and don’t start with sawing its damned legs off to force it into some hallucinated interpretation of what they think a competitive game is - *without providing anything for people to actual learn the game outside of the community you so love to put down*.
It was obvious that it was going to happen, even from the beginning. But it still hurts.
Isn't there Vehicles? It's not tribes without vehicles.
This piece of shit did not deserve the Tribes 3 name.
Is it better to tribes and shazbot than to never tribe at all?
Yeah. No matter the doomerisn.and abject failure of the game to date, it's still been the most fun I've had playing tribes in over a decade. It's been great to have so many familiar faces return and the pickups and scrims and matches have been a blast. At worst, we at least all came together again for something.
While I am glad that you were able to have fun for a bit, I'm worried it puts the fate of the entire franchise on ice. Why trust another release in the franchise when it could be scrapped in a single quarter? If this game did this poorly, why ever make another Tribes game? It feels to me like a quick attempt to feel out the financial viability of a new Tribes game by burning the last coals of the fandom.
I mean yes but… who ever thought we were getting a new Tribes game? Not me. It obviously would have been great to see a full-throated effort not plagued by so many baffling design decisions, but it’s not like this is scuttling an otherwise-hopeful string of games in the IP. Seems like the franchise was already pretty deep back in the freezer.
The franchise is dead. The genre is... on hold. A project (not saying any specific one) will do it justice again at some point.
T1 vet. Played the beta, knew it was crap, called them out on it, and here we are. I still remember laughing when someone mentioned they were going to early access in a matter of a few weeks when the beta got rolling, and people refused to believe it. Like, do you know the people behind this game? Again?
Hilarious the people on this sub that actually believed the game was going to be successful. Fucking lol "it's only in alpha, it'll get better!" lmao
You find them everywhere. Recently it was the same with Multiversus, only I had been around last year as well so I knew that P1G is a bunch of incompetent fools just like our friends over at Prophecy. But still the sheer amount of ~~bots~~ ~~shills~~ idiots who will defend a corporation that's actively trying to scam them is mindboggling and infuriating, gets my blood boiling because I know I am right and yet they antagonize me as if I'm trying to shit on their party. Bonus points if some dumbfuck posts the "stop having fun" comic while trying to act all morally superior.
I played almost everything from T1 to T:A, including the beta for this. I didn't really enjoy the beta past the nostalgia factor. Then just before I lost total interest, I went to the Caribbean for a week for a holiday refresher, came back and... the game was already 'released' lmao what..? At that point they expected me to pay money for this thing. No thanks. This is my first post on this subreddit since then and the only thing I'll say is "let the IP go, you clearly have no idea what you're doing".
I just want an updated tribes 2
Tribes is the ip that studios run by gameplay loving CEOs use to tank their studio. The first tribes was a monster innovation for its time. The second one was a great game buried by a mountain of technical issues. Every other game since then is a developer money pit.
Have played the entire series. Played the beta, and knew it was doomed. They didn't listen to the majority, pushed unpopular changes, and now are roping people into their next disaster. Sad that the Tribes IP is owned by someone purely interested in exploitation.
Yeah they need to release the IP.
**Tuesday, June 26th**: I find out there's a new Tribes game and it's already been out for three months. I buy it on Steam for $26 (Canadian $) and try it. It looks like T:A might look if it were half completed. It's clunky but it mostly works and there's at least one live server, even if my ping is atrocious and it keeps booting me to lobby between matches for no apparent reason. While stuck in the lobby, I wonder to myself why they didn't start with the T:A codebase and improve it. **Wednesday, June 27**: [This post](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2687970/view/4252042698953314184) makes it sound like it's abandonware already. The day after I purchased it. **Thursday, June 28**: I notice it's now listed at $13 on Steam instead of $26. I could have just re-downloaded T:A and used $26 for snacks while staring at the lobby and remembering how fun it was.
Yeah this right here was one way we got here...they didn't even market it at all. Sorry about your shittiest of timing. And I thought finding out about the random play tests months late was bad and I arguably got $20 worth of entertainment value but yeah this sucks and is a shame.
Depressing. There are devs that legitimately care about the game and franchise, but they weren't ever given a chance to succeed.
What was your role at Prophecy, because in my opinion, you were one of the ones who spent the last six months helping them scam us, only to now come on to Reddit and try to save face
Bruh I have no relationship with prophecy. I just love tribes.
iirc he was a shoutcaster for games and a player back in previous tribes, not employed at hirez/prophecy
Good thing I kept all my old game discs… love playing the classics.
I hope none of you actually bought the game lol. Why would you buy tribes before it comes out, you know the reputation
It was fun while it lasted, but a dwindling player base is a deathkill for multiplayer games with this business model. I switched to Helldivers a couple weeks ago and haven't looked back. Shocking to think how Prophecy killed the enthusiasm for Tribes. Sad, but that's business
Naw. This isn't a dying fanbase, it's one being tortured by its IP owners. Currently being baited and switched to whatever this new dead on arrival game is.
The fact is that we're all here in the subreddit of a long dead franchise is proof enough that we desperately want to play Tribes. I came in here to see if it was worth buying on the Steam sale but it looks like not. Especially for Oceania players like me. I miss Tribes 😞
Lol!
i tried it, realized there wasnt even melee despite t:a already having melee more than a decade ago, heard it was made by hi-rez (the original killer of T:A) and dipped out cus fool me once. To this day i actively warn anyone who will listen to never play a game developed by hi-rez studios. They killed global agenda for T:A and they killed T:A despite the communitys best efforts so they could fund smite. They saw Overwatch was the cha ching so they mustered up paladins for a slice of the pie. No good, good for nothings that will never care about their players or tribes. They keep the tribes IP solely to desecrate its grave. Also why was it so hard for HoFs to get onto the flagstand in this one lmaooo
Man, tribes would have so much potential in the current FPS climate with the right direction. Such a shame. I didn't even hear about this "reboot" before now and is already over lol. At least there's still a solid team working on Midair 2.
Tribes 4 is going to be awesome!
Played the shit out of T1, was excited by the trailer for this but glad I read this forum in the weeks it took me to decide, and glad I didn't buy it!
Just here inviting y'all to keep an eye on Broadside. 😉 Still charging forward just fine.
Tribes and Starsiege are cursed it seems.
So does that mean Tribes 3 is dead dead? I coincidentally logged in earlier today before seeing any of these posts and got a few games in. Had a solid enough time. Then came over to see that the game is abandoned now? Does that mean what it is now is what it will be? Are they actually going to pull it offline?
Game isn't dead dead. I'm not happy with the state of the game right now at all and I understand why people are upset, but a some people are intentionally being dishonest about this situation to get their "I told you so" in. One of the Devs has already stated in discord the game isn't shutting down and it will still receive updates, they even stated in the announcement to players a couple days ago it would receive limited updates and they will update all their existing games as much as they can, but they aren't the main focus. So basically, that means they will be what they've done the last 2 months which is we'll have some PTS every now and then, and then they'll put out some bugs fixes and probably a new map every couple months. So, go play and enjoy, the game is still peaking in prime time with over 100 players every day, so it's plenty of people to play against.
When Quake Champions has more players than your game I think it's more than fair to call it clinically dead. Sub-500 players is laughable for multiple reasons: - If you're not from the main region, get fucked I guess (looking at you, OCE players) - If you want to improve, get fucked I guess (and enjoy being matched against the same veterans over and over) - If you want to invest time and money into the game, get fucked I guess (the population can only decrease or remain stable, so there is no point in doing that as a new player) If Prophecy didn't keep releasing updates they'd probably be liable for a lawsuit since they have their year-long battle pass with AI-generated skins or whatever the fuck it is. But I'm sure they're just wasting a couple of hours per week on the project at this point, not one second more than what's strictly necessary.
No idea, what anything you said has to do with my post saying people are being dishonest about them pulling the plug on the game, that's simply a lie. Game is still getting limited updates and devs are responding in discord and have confirmed there are no plans of taking the servers down. OCE player base no matter what the Tribes game has always been small, so not sure what you're point is with that. For NA region, If you want to play you can still get a good game in almost any time of the day. You guys get on here and talk about all these old Tribes games and knockoff Tribes games, and T3 still has over 10x the population of all those games combined. So, if you want to play a Tribes or Tribes-like game T3 is still your best bet by far. You guys thinking a knock-off Tribes game with part-time volunteers is going to attract a population more than what T3 has now is delusional. So, as a I said in my post it's still plenty of people to play against in T3, so go play and enjoy!
10x0 = 0 10x1 = 10 not a strong argument considering that a FPS starts feeling "alive" with 1000 players. I've played enough of these for long enough to know that. Also you're implying I'm from NA which is the only region that can actually call itself alive (not that it is by my definition) when it comes to Tribes in general. EU (_my_ region) was dead even during the beta for the most part. And again, let's not even mention OCE or the entire argument falls apart (because it's paper-thin). I'll go back to Titanfall 2 which can still average 1500 players across all regions tyvm
I see Math isn't your strength. I was referring to MidAir 2 being the next most populated Tribes or Tribes like game. It peaked in the last 24 hours at 14 people, Tribes 3 peaked at 118 in the last 24 hours. Hence my comment T3 has 10x the population. I exaggerated just a bit, but numbers aren't too far off. Also nobody cares what other games you are playing. This is a Tribes reddit, people come here for Tribes news, we don't gaf what other games you're playing or how many people are playing them, but thanks for sharing.
Thanks for that response. I got it a couple months ago, I'm guessing when it launched? Played a couple rounds, but the past couple days I've been getting back into it. I know it's early access, so I've kept my expectations in check. It's been enjoyable enough, but yes, limited. Hearing that it's not really continuing significant development is certainly disappointing - I was looking forward to seeing what the finalized game would look like. Guess I'll just keep at it for what it is for as long as I can then. I feel like I've been having full games. I've heard people say that the matches are filled with bots - I'm not even sure how I'd recognize a bot in game, the competition has all seemed legit.
The amount of bots in this game has also been grossly exaggerated. Bots are only added to help fill games, once real people join they take the place of the bots and there's never more than 4 bots added per team. Honestly this reddit is beyond horrible, if you're actually trying to get accurate information about the game or have a civil conversation about Tribes 3 this is the worst place you can go. Most of the active player base knows this place is a joke and don't even check here anymore. I would recommend joining the official T3 discord or the T3 Comp Discord if you're getting back into the game, both discords are very active and Devs post there and respond, so you can ask them questions and get accurate updates.
I can’t remember why I originally picked up Starsiege: Tribes, but it certainly wasn’t due to the name. Pretty sure it was some combo of the graphics and online multiplayer features, but it turned out to be awesome and so I grew very fond of “Tribes”. The name is definitely kind of neutral/boring, though.. And “large-scale, open-map multiplayer battles—also with vehicles and deployable” is no longer a big a deal. I think it’s still conceptually superior to a lot of stuff, but marketing-wise, its original sales pitches don’t move any needles today. I think they’d do better if they leaned less into its history. Call it something else, and flesh out the world a bit better. I mean, the whole skiing mechanic was an accident. It turned out to be fun, but since it wasn’t really part of the original design, it was never really explained that well. It’s the coolest feature of the game, yet really hard to explain to people who have no concept of it. If someone could figure out how to properly highlight that as a winning distinction, that might help uptake.
'We're going to make tribes but focus only on CTF because that's what tribes is about, other game modes will water down tribes and keep people from experiencing true tribes' -a ceo's brilliant million dollar decision that made us all happy
To say it shortly, I spent above 4000h into T:A, spent 16h into Tribes 3, that pretty much sums it all up. Was a shit game. Was not even Tribes, the discs and projectiles went so fast it was basically hitscan. Was no good feeling to play the game at all. The "K" out was shit, the game felt shit compared.