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Comment by MrZongle2 | Hacker News Reader

But in retrospect, even Tribes 2 wasn't that much of a disappointment. The hard-core types that frequented Tribalwar complained incessantly about it, and I grant you that the weeks following its release were bumpy, but there were a lot of people who enjoyed the game considerably.

Now Tribes:Vengeance and the free-to-play nonsense that is Tribes Ascend? Those have brought the franchise to a near-standstill.

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Tribes: Ascend was also fine, even with the free-to-play parts, until they pushed the monetization just a little too far. I think I have something like 200 hours in it playing the basic classes with most of the essential unlocks, and it was a great game. And then they released way too much paid DLC and things got a bit too ridiculous for me.

Ascend now gives all unlocks for a fixed price. The game has received some support recently, mainly changes to make it more like classic Tribes games.

That's cool to hear! I'm glad they finally made the paid content system sane.

Though... for this guy in particular it came too late. At this point Tribes: Ascend will probably remain a game I at one point played every night.

You're joking, right? It took something like 3 months of near-constant patches before Tribes 2 would even run on my machine. It was the buggiest game I've ever bought, and I was shocked that they'd chosen to release it in that broken state.

By the time they'd patched it well-enough that it actually ran somewhat reliably, my friends and I had completely lost interest in it. Tribes 2 was a franchise-killer. I never even tried Tribes: Vengeance after that debacle.

(Tribes Ascend started out great, then became a textbook case of how pay-to-win makes good games terrible.)

Playing Tribes 2 was where I learned about Unhandled Exceptions and exception handling. (I wasn't coding regularly then.) The game regularly crashed with "UE"s several times an hour for the first few months. At one point, I downgraded to a TNT2 to get it to play.

Tribes Ascend wasn't that bad during its early beta stages, though. I think that was late 2011 / early 2012. It went downhill with the consecutive patches following the game's release in April 2012.

The devs made some utterly idiotic decisions regarding how they wanted the game to work and it ended up having a whole load of unintended negative effects.

If you're falling above 72km/hr and jetpack, they do nothing and you actually fall faster. Under 72 it decelerates as you'd expect. This is purely because they tried to impose variable physics based on your velocity, which in turn was a bandaid to address other issues.

They really shot themselves in the foot and only as of about 6 months ago - if that - has a small subgroup of the old devs been allowed to start unravelling the mess and make it more like Tribes 1. Before that, they basically ceased work on the game and abandoned it in favour of throwing all their devs at their next cash grab endeavour, Smite.

SMITE's actually a really good game though with a very fair and affordable payment system.

Criticize them for not allocating enough staff to maintain Tribes Ascend, sure, but it's unfair to call SMITE a cash-grab.

Fair; I called it such because I was bitter that they completely and unapologetically dropped T:A just as it was getting some momentum behind it simply to divert everyone onto SMITE. It felt like the next trend came along (MOBA) so they just completely abandoned T:A without a second thought.

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