Cavalier said:
Only way to continue a franchise is to bring new players into the mix. T2 might not have appealed to 75% of the Tribalwar community, but it appealed to a whole new mass of players that entered the Tribes world.
T:V on the other hand just killed everything. They tried to be new and innovative while catering to the Tribalwar crowd and missed completely. Furthermore they spent more time on appealing to people, and jazzing things up, than spending it on simple gameplay issues and competition balancing. Demos dont work, Observer features are basically worthless, Netcode is awful, Server Code and what I guess is a memory leak makes it nearly impossible to play. I havent even touched any competition level balancing issues.
New players breathe new life into a franchise - you cant hope to keep the same playerbase forever, because human nature is to be fickle, never mind people simply growing out of their gaming phaze.
I mean how many T1 Vets actively play any game, or more importantly, would play a game.
Exactly. T2 did not "kill" the franchise, but its out of the box release did eventually kill the momentum and made a lot of harcore T1 vets of the time abandon the game never to look back.
What has happened with T2 is that it has evolved with T1 like gameplay in mods such as classic and of course there are a large mass of players that like base. Some of these players are from T1, some are a whole new set of players that discovered Tribes with Tribes 2.
In other words T2 did become a very worthy sequel to T1 that did attract a large number of players over time. Some T1 vets just dont know that because they only know the game from its tarnished release.
If T2's base game was released with the speed and without all the bugs, video card issues, etc out of the box, Tribes 2 would still be one of the top online games and the community would still be flourishing. T2 is not a bad game at all. Its game design is well thought out, and the vehicles are very well balanced. The server piece, observer mode, voting system outstanding. All of this missed unfortunately due major release blunders: a physics change (speed) and buggy ass release.
So many may say, well give TV some time. T2 improved. This is true, but
TV, probaly in an attempt to please T1 competition vets and newbies with its minimalist approach removed so much that was Tribes that its hard to believe simple mods can fix some of these problems Ok sure many T1 competition players may not have used vehicles, or the command map etc, but hey, they are all an inherent part of the game for a large mass of folks
who dont play in competition. If you do compete, you dont have to use those features.
As cavalier mentioned, there are so many non-functional features in the TV MP game that dont work or need to be fixed. And even with fixes, many of the in game features (voting and observer mode etc) are so badly designed that even fixing them wields an inferior feature compared to T1 and T2. The scale of the game was completely changed, skiing isnt Tribes interpretation of skiing its literally skiing.
Also, TV's big claim being built on Unreal engine was that it would be so easy for the modding community to mod the game and simply put back anything thats missing in the base game. Im not finding very many in the modding community finding it easy to mod the game.
TV's thinktank amounted to this, Water it down to suit the essence of what Tourney T1 players want and yet make those features and the game newbie friendly, but remember the SP is priority.
Yes T2 killed momentum, but TV with its third try and watered down nature could probaly be called the killer.