I have memories of buddies in college being SUPER into it. I was never very good. But it still stands out to this day as a game with a unique feeling of speed and motion and control.
Yeah, I’m going to reserve my excitement for when I see gameplay footage or actually play it. Quake Champions looked really good in the beginning and then it ran like an internal pre-alpha. Tribes Ascend had so many OP hitscan weapons on release you thought you were playing Call of Duty. Waning general interest in “boomer shooters” and disastrous releases make these games more nostalgic memories than interesting future games in my mind.
I love tribes - I even still have the same mousepad from when I played it last - but I want to warn people this is being made by Prophecy Games, who have straight up abandoned their last game. Starsiege Deadzone, put out in July, is already dead. Take a look at the steam charts for proof. I want Tribes more than most other old IPs, but we have to be real cautious with our hype, so to speak.
It seems like it was their only game released so far, so maybe they’ll learn from their mistakes this time. There could be multiple reasons that it got abandoned.
One thing that I (seemingly incorrectly) kind of disliked about Ascend was that if was so focused on kind of being an e-sport. My favorite part of the original were the havoc and ultra renegades mods and bringing it heavy weaponry to try and crash through the other guys base before they could do us. The new games feel like you just see the lights zipping through at 300kph and my reflexes can’t keep up with that anymore.
Any game that I might play that’s a competition between two parties needs to be “balanced for esports” because otherwise I’m gonna find the imbalance and wreck everyone without all the fun parts and effort.
I play games that are a fight to get into the flow state. That’s the fun in it for me. If I’m not pushed to the top of my performance capability, I’m not into it.
Why not? If it plays well, has a nice story, interesting setting or whatever else, doesnt have to be the best looker to be a good time.
I mean, you do what you want but feels like to me you make yourself miss out on good things that are out there just because they dont have top tier graphics.
Dusk isnt the best looking game, but its good. Just as an example.
BattleBit is the perfect example that graphics don’t make a game good or bad. It looks like Roblox, but when you’re in the game your don’t even notice, until suddenly you realize how funny it is. BattleBit is the best Battlefield game in a very long time, while the modern Battlefield games are graphically amazing. They’re just shitty games. The graphics of it also make it very readable. There’s not a bunch of junk making it harder to tell what you’re seeing. It shows what needs to be shown and that’s about it.
They should give it good graphics. That will help pull in more new players and give the game a better chance of taking off. That being said, it shouldn’t be to worry, hopefully. These are early visuals.
“It’s important to note that the game is still very early in development, and these screenshots don’t show the latest state of the game, but it does give us a general idea of the style they are going for.”
These are pre-alpha visuals. It’s not uncommon for games at this stage to look even worse than this.
Not how it works. They have assets already made. You don’t redo character models, weapon models for a beta release. At best you use stand-in models, when it’s not important to look good. This isn’t a stand-in model, replacement or anything else. A spinfusor is a spinfusor. It has all the animations, all the textured. Game has motion blur even.
Best that’ll change is the lighting, explosions etc. But the map is already looking bad for 2023, so do the models. I’m not holding my breath for better visuals.
You do, in fact, actually redo character models and other stuff for a beta release. This is early alpha, they’re using placeholder models and textures, probably from previous Tribes games, nailing the core gameplay loop before working on graphics.
They also have Starseige Deadzone and Starseige Raiders (Raiders isn’t available yet, but has been playable for a while). They all share some weapons, but Tribes has been a different time period in the past, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the models change to fit Tribes better.
That said, yeah. All of it is possible to change. Graphics, particularly terrain, are pretty likely to be cleaned up. The first goal is to make it playable, then to make it as good as possible.
The last Tribes game before this was Ascend, released over a decade ago.
Polygon targets, textured sizes, shader technology and much else has evolved dramatically since then.
You may reuse old assets as placeholders during development (but this can be problematic for the same reasons why temp music in filmmaking is problematic), but you absolutely do not have assets already made. Assets change over the course of development, often right up until release.
I can’t speak to whether or not these assets are from Ascend or earlier, nor can I speak to the visual production quality Prophecy is capable of, but seeing shoddy looking visuals from a pre-alpha title is normal.
I hope so too. Tribes Ascend was one of the few shooters I’ve enjoyed despite HiRez’s best efforts otherwise. If they can put together a good game I’ll be all over this. Few things in gaming are as sweet as the sound of a blue plate special.
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