Well, I was ready to flame you Nat, but then I took a different approach to looking how you said things and think I came up with a better understanding of what you're trying to get across than I originally had.
T2 is a good game, no question about that. But there are different types of games, and different types of gameplay within those games. T2 was Dave's vision, he had the authority to do what he felt best to make a game that he thought would be good. I feel sorry for the Dev members that got laid off, but then again I hope you may find a better home where your input would be better appreciated and used.
I can only wonder what T2 would have been like had not only the original dev team members created the game, but had also created the game based on how they wanted it to be(as they had done in the original).
DaveG took us for a ride. He blinded us by gracing us with his presence and acting like a people's person, assuring us all would be good. All of that was a facade, Dave just wanted his game to be a sucess, and by winning over the core gamers of the original Tribes, it wouldn't take long for us to spread the word on how great this game would be.
It was a bitch slap to the face to see you make a game that you said "would be different" yet it would be a game based on "what the community wanted," and then see you release a game that was soley based on what you felt it should be.
I'm not saying this is a bad game, not at all. Tribes2 is a good game, but it misses KEY elements that made the original a success. People will say if you want the Tribes feel then go back and play tribes, to you I say this, had I wanted a totally different game, I would have bought Black&White or some other game, not tribes2.
People say that the "capping cowboy" was a bad thing. A capping cowboy could not just stroll in and grab the flag and walk away against a good defense. But in T2, you cannot make that last minute blind rush for their flag, blazing away with your grenades and discs while your "capping cowboy" comes in to snatch up the flag and quickly fades into the horizon just in time to prevent the other team from making the game winning cap. That made the game exhilerating, and it also meant that if two teams went head to head, anything could happen.
But with the changes, there are things in Tribes2 that are positive. The need for new innovation is renewed. At the end of playing Tribes, scrims/matches felt more like going thru motions than anything. Tribes had reached a point where there was nothing left to discover, nothing less to change the game to make it appealing, and exhilerating like it had been a few months back.
With Tribes2 I am challenged to use my brain to think of new ways to do the same things I did in Tribes. That still provides a rush for me, not as much so as tribes, but the adrenaline is still there. It took 3 months or so out of the gates before Tribes truly hit its stride. New things to learn, new techniques to try, and suddenly it was like the gameplay was changing on a daily basis. It kept you on your toes, it made you want to learn, and most importantly it made you want to play until the wee hours of the night.
Whether or not tribes2 has this, time will tell. T2 hasn't reached the 3 month mark yet, but I believe when competition starts to really heat up on the ladders that we will begin to see new things being discovered and used(or at least that's what I'm hoping for).
My only request is that GarageGames make Tribes3. They were the majority of the brains behind the original, and brought me to play this game for countless hours on end. I would like to see what they envisioned the next game in the tribes series to be like, to see how they would have done things had not a narrow minded man designed T2 the way he wanted it.
