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?
If you’re not one of the more than 300,000 players that participated in the closed beta test for Tribes: Ascend, your time has come. On February 24 you get to stop reading about what Hi-Rez Studios has done with your beloved Tribes franchise and experience it first-hand.
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.
Direct from QuakeCon 2011, here’s 20 minutes of Tribes: Ascend in action, filmed during a demonstrations of Hi-Rez Studios’ revitalisation of the beloved franchise. Makes me want to play it all over again.
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.
