http://www.pcgamer.com/the-surprising-return-of-tribes-ascend/2/
Hirez good guys. Makes me wanna come back and play. PR campaign success?
Late last year, Tribes: Ascend returned*after a long hiatus. The Out of the Blue update stripped entire*systems out of Hi-Rez’s free-to-play Tribes sequel and overhauled others, attempting to deliver an experience closer to Tribes 2, and more palatable to the Tribes community. It’s one of the most unusual stories in modern game development—and if you read between the lines, it has a lot to teach about communities, communication, expectation and nostalgia. What it takes to resurrect a classic, and what gets taken for granted.*
The story of Tribes, Ascend and Hi-Rez is a complicated one. It’s one of the best team FPS designs in the history of PC gaming—deep, skill-intensive, exciting and storied. I’ve loved it since I played Tribes 2 as a teenager: it was far ahead of its time, a precursor to massive joint-arms multiplayer games like Battlefield but possessed of ideas and experiences that you can’t find anywhere else. Skiing and jetpacks, for example. Bases that operate as massive connected devices, with hardy defences and vulnerable generators. The adoption of the word ‘shazbot’.
These are the reasons Tribes has always had a cult following—but they are also the reasons it has never been a mainstream success. Tribes is brilliant and weird and extremely unintuitive. It is an FPS where simply running somewhere is a mistake: the correct option is to shoot yourself with an exploding frisbee while sliding down a hill.*
Beloved as Tribes 2 was, it’s easy to forget that its developer, Dynamix, folded only five months after its North American release. And with the benefit of hindsight it’s not a surprise that Hi-Rez Studios, known only for Global Agenda at the time, would struggle to spin a free-to-play success out of such a defiantly idiosyncratic formula.*
It’s tough to hold on to that frustration when you meet the people who made the game, and given how transparent Hi-Rez have become in the last few years I wonder why they were so quiet about the situation with Tribes. “We were totally different back then,” McBride says. “It wasn’t like we were trying to hide anything from anybody, we just didn’t know what we should say and how we should say it. We did a better job than with Global Agenda, but it’s always a growth thing. We made a lot of promises early on that we shouldn’t. We’ve learned a lot of lessons since then.
“Now it’s a totally different thing, right?” McBride continues. “We go to the community and we talk to them about it. I created a five-page document of all the community requests and ranked them by how many times I’ve seen them. It’s very driven by the community.”
The Out of the Blue update removes several features implemented in order to make Tribes: Ascend work as a free-to-play game—classes, for example, as well as a massive number of ‘sidegrades’ for each weapon archetype. This directly makes the game less viable as a business venture. I ask McBride if this means the decision to return to the game was more ‘heart’ than ‘head’.
“It’s both, honestly,” McBride says. “I personally feel a responsibility to come back and make it a better game because I love it. At the same time it is a business decision. It’s a really rough spot in our company’s history—leaving the game.”
Although Tribes devotees may feel that their game was put aside in favour of Smite, the MOBA’s success is what has allowed Hi-Rez to re-establish a small Tribes development team. “We had enough manpower and enough resources,” McBride says. “We’re, like, 225 people now—we could spare a few.”
Given the small size of the new team, I ask McBride if they ever considered making a simpler, subtler update—a set of fixes rather than a major overhaul. “I felt that if we didn’t do something fundamental and big then we wouldn’t have players come back,” he says. “Let’s really embrace the fact that it’s going to be different now and draw players back with that. Ultimately I felt like players would be bored if it was totally the same game with some new maps and balance changes.”
There’s a performative aspect to this decision too—the scope of the changes is a way of building lines of communication with the community. “It set the stage, right?” McBride says. “This is how big of a change we’re willing to make to the game, so come back, talk about it, give us other ideas, you know?”
Despite the clean slate, I’m interested to find out if there’s anything McBride felt he couldn’t do with the update—a change that he’d like to make, but that wouldn’t work.
“The number one thing for me is, when I first started, I wanted to change the physics,” he says. “I wanted to change how the game felt. I didn’t necessarily want to make it feel like Tribes 1, because the bounciness of its skiing is very odd for new players, but I wanted to redesign how we were doing speed limiting. We’ve really been slammed a lot for speed caps, and it does feel a bit arbitrary—I’d much rather it be resistance-based. We also get some pretty big slams for feeling floaty. That’s a very mixed bag of different issues, but the physics are the number one thing that I wish we could have changed a lot more.”
Ultimately, Ascend’s skiing mechanics were felt to be too intertwined with the core of the game to be altered. “We couldn’t do that because it’s a very deep change, fundamental to Tribes, and it probably would have screwed up a lot of maps,” McBride says.
You might not get to play McBride’s perfect version of Tribes, in that case, but you do get to play one that he—and the community—seem to be happier with. McBride raises a point about the Tribes community that is important, and sometimes forgotten: not everybody is on the same page about what makes Tribes special. In the era of reboots and nostalgia-powered crowdfunding campaigns, it’s easy to forget that the classics of the late ’90s were different things to different people.
“Different people remember different things,” McBride says. “Some people remember it being a big, vehicle-based game. Some people remember it being about skiing and mid-airing people. Some people remember siege mode, some people remember Capture the Flag. It was tons of different things. Most people don’t even remember the core game, they remember a mod they played because the mods were server-side. The community is so fractured that it’s hard for everybody to decide what they want to see out of a Tribes game. That’s an unfortunate situation.”
In that case, I ask, what does ‘done’—or ‘leave it in a better state’—look like? “
If people don’t say ‘Sean killed Tribes’, I’ll be happy,” McBride says, simply. “Generally I’m pretty happy with where the game is right now. I wish we could have done more things. For me, games are like art—it’s not finished, it’s abandoned. That’s just honestly the truth.”
Sean*McBride has been Tribes: Ascend’s creative director since last August. He was a member of the original team, and one of the people who pushed for Hi-Rez to acquire the licence in the first place. It’s obvious that he loves the game and is saddened by what the community views as Hi-Rez’s decision to abandon the project. When he talks about returning to work on Ascend, he describes wanting to leave it in a better state—not, necessarily, to relaunch it as a business venture.*
“We all know that player counts are not going to be super high,” he says. “The intention is to at least stretch it out over a longer tail, so, if we do need to leave it, we’ll have a planned date, so we can make sure everything’s in order. We didn’t do that last time. It was like ‘we all need to go onto Smite, right now.’”
When the decision was made to pull ongoing support for Ascend, Hi-Rez was in a vulnerable situation as a company. Tribes was making money, but not a lot of it, and the developer’s new MOBA Smite represented a potentially business-saving opportunity for the studio. “We were in talks with multiple publishers,” McBride remembers, “and then we eventually got the deal with TenCent. We had to get [Smite] into a really good state. It was very do-or-die at that time.*
“I wasn’t super happy leaving the game at all,” he says of Tribes: Ascend. “I felt like we had a lot more things we could have done and should have done differently. We were a younger company back then and we didn’t have a lot of manpower, either.”*
Talk to anybody from Hi-Rez about Tribes and you get the same feeling: of not being quite happy with how everything ended up. Of—until recently—not being entirely sure what to do about it. There’s a pronounced contrast with how proud they seem of Smite, which has been an unprecedented success for the studio both financially and in the community that has grown up around it. Yet the Tribes community has always been there, and there’s always been frustration—which you can see if you look at the comments threads for almost any article about the studio’s games over the last two and a half years.
Hirez good guys. Makes me wanna come back and play. PR campaign success?
Agreed.
