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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Hi-Rez’s free-to-play shooter Tribes: Ascend is doing quite well — it has been downloaded 1.2 million times in its first month, with 110,000 people joining through the game’s friend-referral system.
I spotted a thread about Tribes: Ascend over on Reddit claiming that “there are barely any players” in Australia and that the game was “full all the time” just two weeks ago. As I write this, the thread has over 250 comments, though many are not from our neck of the woods. It then occurred to me there’s a very easy way to get a health check on the local Tribes: Ascend scene. You’re reading it right now.
Tribes: Ascend officially launches on April 12, a day when llamas will rain from the sky, filling multiplayer maps with fresh corpses until they’re nothing but islands of dead… oh! See what they did there?
A Starsiege: Tribes player from way back (when it was in the hands of Sierra and Dynamix) I’ve been closely following the development of Hi-Rez Studios’ Tribes: Ascend. While I’m wary of the class-based gameplay and the gun models taking up uncomfortable amounts of screen real estate, I am prepared to give it a chance.
Fans eager to see what Atlanta-based Hi-Rez Studios is doing to the Tribes franchise should head for QuakeCon in Dallas August 4 through 7, where Tribes: Ascend will be available in playable form, with closed beta keys up for grabs.
The next Tribes game, Hi-Rez Studios’ Tribes Ascend, will be free. It’s the loadouts in this online PC shooter that will cost you.
