Tribes: Ascend, a 2012 game which in 2015 made a surprising comeback from the dead, is now dead once more, with developers Hi-Rez today issuing the game’s final patch to a community that’s understandably upset, if also accepting of the game’s fate.
There’s a sad poetry to the fact that I wrote about the game’s update in 2015 and headlined the article “Not All Multiplayer Shooters Are Abandoned After 12 Months”. And here we are, 12 months later, and the game is being abandoned. Welp.
The final patch is called “parting gifts”, and while it makes a lot of changes and fixes to a game whose servers are still up and running, it also appears to have been too little too late, with the Tribes community — or what’s left of it, the game having languished with little attention or interest for a while now — already talking about saying goodbye to the game, and what their hopes and options are for the future.
Maybe fans will take over running the servers. Maybe a new studio will make a game just like Tribes (like Archetype are doing with Midair). Who knows, maybe a new company will come along, pick up the rights to the Tribes series and pay a little more attention to it than Hi-Rez ever did.
Comments
5 responses to “Tribes Is Dead Again”
The really sad thing is that ascend was actually a very fun game, with an amazingly high skill ceiling, spectacular pay-off, and a solid feedback loop.
Here’s a sample of just how impressively skilful this game is (not a bs montage, this is all from comp play!): https://youtu.be/DYfMhcm1ngY
They missed a couple of features, never really hit that critical mass of player numbers, but it ended up as my favourite competitive game.
The high survivability in duelling and weapon learning curve probably turned all but the most hardcore players away at the start (this is a game where it can take a while to get your first kill), but it must have been tough to do away with that without disrupting the core gameplay.
I’m hoping that more casual games can become popular whilst borrowing the most mechanics from tribes, but I don’t see the series itself turning around without destroying its legacy.
Splatoon does the trinity pretty well!
well they can’t support it when they are busy copying games like overwatch.
People say they want arena shooters… but really they don’t. *Shrugs*
I want arena shooters but I didn’t want this particular style. UT4 is nice, but Tribes was never my thing
I loved all of the Tribes games and thought Ascend was fantastic! Not to mention the great community that developed around it. I haven’t played Ascend since it started to die a couple years back but needless to say, this still makes me sad 🙁