VUG's answer on the patch cancelation

Skiing made more sense this time around, I would have to agree. It was definately a lot less 'reckless' compared to the past two version, and personally I think they almost struck gold on how they decided to implement it.

Carving is ultimately what killed it, along with the fact that there was virtually no maximum velocity cap on how fast you could go (although I never really had trouble with how fast people were moving... but I guess some people did? I guess I could understand if they were talking about the heavies, but I found the speed appropriate for the game nonetheless).

In ways, I liked the only having 3 weapons for all armors part. In one instance, I think that giving each armor only 3 weapons, and debuffing the heavy and allowing it to go faster, along with allowing the medium to go faster, took less of an emphasis on the individual armor type.

In Tribes 2 there was a very noticable difference between each of the armors, and I would normally play light. But I think they way they set it up in T:V was pretty good, I actually found myself playing all the armor types a lot more, and I used certain armors for certain things, because I knew that I could actually use the armor for that purpose and be pretty effective too.

At the same time, the lack of definition also turns me off a bit. I can understand why people would be upset. I mean... this big armor, this hunkah metal... carries the same amount of weapons as this light armored raisin over here? Hurm.... But personally, to me, each armor having its own special weapon made up for that.

If it was really up to me, I'd give light 3 weapons, medium 4, and heavy type, and instead of each class only having one special weapon to call their own, I would give 2 armor-specific weapons to each class (NOT removing what was already there). But that's just me, I guess. Some people might say its a good thing that I'm not in charge of these ideas in Renwerx, eh? :)

The funny thing with people is that with each Tribes game, they either hate it, or enjoy it. And they usually have very specific reasons why. I can't blame them, it's perfectally normal to do that. But I think the more you look at things from a wider perspective, instead of being just black and white... I think the more people do things like that, the more effective one could use the information gathered turing an extended period to form a new tribes game.

What I find funny is that there are so many different opinions on what Tribes IS. One person is no more right than the next. The only way you can really make out what makes Tribes, Tribes, is it's common terms shared between the individual games. That would include Spinfusor, and TL, and the 3 armor types, and energy. I'm not so sure about the rocket launcher. Definitally not the grappler. All the common mods made for the games are Tribes, because they've been there in both games.

Another thing... you can't really blame anyone for what was T:V. There's no point in putting the soul blame on any organization or person. In reality we all contributed (maybe some more than others, but it would be pointless to sit down and analyze that), and that's all you can really say. If people saw this, and accepted it (I'm sure some of you probably are shaking your heads right now, sorry) we could all try to learn from our mistakes and make changes the time a new tribes game comes out. Me, personally... I would try to get my friends interested in the game more. I would probably also spread the word via articles in gaming forums, or something.

The future existance of tribes, if any (personally I can't see such a good concept for a game go down the dumps and never be heard of again, Tribes no matter what version is crack to me) relies on everyone realizing what they might have done wrong, and change it, or at least in my eyes. It doesn't rely on one person taking the blame off them completely and putting it on someone elses, or a companies, shoulders. If everyone just worried about themselves at priority #1, we could be as a community (that is, game producers, players, and anywhere in between) more productive. Productive critique/comments would be useful, but probably only if you felt REALLY bothered about something to comment on it, and you made sure that there were no personal attacks in the message (basically, keep it a state of neutrality and stick to the facts). A bad example of this would be "PLZ ADD DERMS! ME AND MY FRIENDZ ONLY USD TO USE THEM HAHA OK? K THNX BAI! AND ALL U PEOPLE WHO DONT LKE IT CAN GO (add offensive adjective here) UR MOM!"

One thing, it's not very important is it? Yes to some it might be, but the fact in which it is written really doesn't help. I can almost guarentee that no game producer would take that seriously, even if they got around to reading it amongst all the other hundreds of requests that basically would be the same thing.

A good example? "Please consider my advice on <Add what you want to be added or changed here>.

<Add reasons for here.>

<Add reasons against here.>

<Make a conclusion supporting your initial desire.>

Depending on how people then reply to that (either in the same manner of which the person wrote it, or a less productive manner more like the first person "OMGZ NO UR WRONG U JUST SUCK N WONT ADMIT IT!") would then determine the validity of that thread.

Alright, I know, I'm rambling on. Sorry about the length of the post, I felt it was kinda nessasary... was quite fun writing it too. Yes, these are personal views, but I hope you guys can reflect on them in a good way. Keep in mind, we are all on the same team here. We are all tribers, either retired, veterans, old, and new alike. But we can say that at some point in time we were or are tribers.
 
ZProtoss said:
It's been said many, *many* times before. But marketing issues aside, the game couldn't have picked a worse release date. It landed in the center of what could be described as a perfect storm for gaming. It simply wasn't going to steal money away from HL2/WoW (and others) when it was released. The shitty marketing (among other things) was the icing on the cake.
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I dont say the game failed because of the release date or marketing, but yes its kind of ironic they release it right before Half Life 2, which was the same case with Tribes 1. it was released at the same time with Half Life which overshadowed it because HF had such a great SP.

Now all the kuckleheads at VU still think Tribes needed a good SP or isnt popular. They just dont effing get it at all. We really need someone else to control this franchise. Seriously.

It seems a lot of good things are happening at Garage Games, and that some of them are getting back into actually making games. How I wish they could get their baby back. I absolutely have no faith in VU at all. And Im sorry, Irrational is a good dev company, but I just dont think they were the right dev match for a game like Tribes. We need a dev more like Raven Software or Splash Damage who is into making intense, MP style games.
 
ya i injoy tribes vengeance it just bumbs me out how there not going to fix the the many many bugs in the game and how no one ever plays the mp games ive only been to one server with a man made map every one els keeps playing the same maps over and over agin and lits face it sp was not that great at all but i gess ill play back to tribes 2 were im still playing lvls i have never played befor
 
Hahah, I actually started playing T:V SP last night, after attempting a level or two at a friends house just to show him how its all done. I actually thought this game had one of the more brilliant SPs that I've ever played.
 
You know whats funny though? I like the SP maps WAY more than the MP maps. the SP maps I think hit the mark moreso than the MP ones, well, at least a little.

I really hope people take my post at the top of this page to heart. I really think I made a few good points there if not much else.
 
that was one thing i NEVER understood....why they didnt make most of the SP maps into MP maps....sure not all of them would have translated well..but still....oh well
 
Yeah, now that I think about it that coliseum level where your Julia (not Daniel) would have kicked butt for LT. Yes, I know, not everyone is into the LT thing, but please just respect the fact that some people do. Diversity is the spice of life after all. :)

But anywho, yeh, I do remember Coliseum being made into a MP map but I never got to download it. Also, the snow map right after the Coliseum map would have been awesome too.
 
All they had to do was listen to what the community wanted. I'm glad I decided to wait and make sure it was a failure before I bought it. Good thing I didn't waste 50$.
 
stimula said:
All they had to do was listen to what the community wanted. I'm glad I decided to wait and make sure it was a failure before I bought it. Good thing I didn't waste 50$.
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They did, a very small biased fraction of the community, hence the extensive removal of standard in game features and attributes. a bit arrogant and foolishly painful now to realize it was a numbnut idea to remove the command map, sensors, change the scale etc. Did you few really think noone used these features effectively?

Speed was one issue with T2 base, but then you make another foolish mistake by upping the speed and removing everything else.

God how I wish I could go back in time and have the power to change the release of T2. It would have the out of box speed of classic and be without the excessive bugs/performance issues. If that was the case, The Tribes franchise would be in a different state and flourishing and we'd all be singing the praises of T2.
 
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[FotP] I-C-E said:
lets face it, the grappling hook killed T:V.
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Funny thing is, if it weren't for the grappler I would never play the game anymore.

That and the fact that Guild Wars is chewing up most of my free time now. :D
 
Giz said:
Although T2 sold the most copies in the history of the franchise, it was a failure as well. You might find it hard to understand how 400k of sales could be a failure, but the cost of developing the game, marketing, giving the retail channel their cut, supporting the seed servers, and the central server, paying for bandwidth, and QA etc, meant that T2 needed to sell probably another 200k copies to be a success. It didn't.

It is increasingly difficult to make a profit on anything that isn't a huge run away hit, because the economics of selling a game for $50 (and then discounting it) simply can't produce enough revenue to warrant the risk of investing $5+ million in development.
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You're math is off. T2 sold 400k copies. Lets say that the average price of those was $20(low balling it here...the distributor's gotta get some return). That's 8 million in total sales. That's profit. Dynamix probably only got paid around 3-4 million for development(in 2000...average game costs for development were around 4 million...Tribes doesn't have an extraordinary amount of content either...in the way of art and sounds). That's 4-5 million unaccounted for. Lets say 1 million in marketing. 1 million in production costs(the boxes...the CDs). 1 million to maintain the licensing system and master server(that's absurd...master server would never cost them this much...but lets just say it did). That's still 1-2 million in profit.

T2 made VUG profit. If it didn't...T:V would never have even been thought about. T1 probably made VUG profit to be honest.
 
The more I follow the BF2 situation it reminds me of T2. A lot of folks upset and angry over performance problems, bugs in the game, and yet the game is pretty damn good.
 
God how I wish I could go back in time and have the power to change the release of T2. It would have the out of box speed of classic and be without the excessive bugs/performance issues. If that was the case, The Tribes franchise would be in a different state and flourishing and we'd all be singing the praises of T2.
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I wish I could have stopped Sierra from forcing Dynamix to release T2 way too early as well. There could have been some beta testing going on or something...

Anyway, despite my disgust for T:V, I bought it anyway in hope that my contribution to sales might inspire a true Tribes successor to the two games that I feel defined the "online only" game genre. I regret this decision now that I look back on VUG's response to the T:V patch cancellation. I think the poor management on part of the publishers is the primary reason behind the Tribes franchise's latent state. I won't say it is completely dead yet, but nobody can deny that it is in a pretty deep coma.
 
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