Tribes: Ascend

[SenorBeef]

Tribes: Ascend is a new free to play entry into the Tribes series. Some gameplay.

Tribes is pretty much the opposite of everything that modern shooters are - it's wide open, very fast paced, truly 3d (the vertical element is important) and very difficult/skill dependent. Compared to every other shooter which is essentially a COD clone with flat, shoebox sized maps with chokepoints everywhere, it's old school goodness.

One of the main differences is that players can ski, which is to enter a frictionless mode to conserve your momentum. Ski down a big hill, and you can be flying across the map at 100 mph. You also have a jetpack, which you can use to conserve your momentum when going up hill - so it's almost like a 3d version of Tiny Wings, where you build speed going down, and try to conserve speed going up - except in this case, you're trying to shoot other people who can also be going 100+ mph.

So the fights mostly occur at high speed, with both players trying to conserve their momentum, with both players exploiting the vertical, trying to properly lead your target and dodge incoming fire. Your fired projectiles also inherit your momentum - which means you need to compensate for the movement of the target (leading), and also compensate for your own motion. Most of the weapons fire projectiles, rather than hitscan. It makes for high speed, high difficulty gunfight that can go on for extended periods over large areas that are enourmously satisfying when you finally land the kill. It's entirely unlike any other game that's come out in the last 8 years or so.

The main mode is capture the flag, with bases with turret defenses, radar, a generator, etc. but there are other modes - a deathmatch mode with king of the hill elements, where there's a flag that the teams fight over, and whichever team holds it earns double points for kills. Rabbit mode, where there's one flag that everyone tries to get - and the person who gets the flag gets hunted down by everyone in the game who wants to steal it - with the winner being the guy who held the flag longest throughout the game. Capture and hold - which I haven't played yet and couldn't find a description of. And arena, which is a 5v5 limited respawn deathmatch game.

There are a variety of classes and weapons. Light scouts that go fast that work great as flag cappers, heavy siege classes that are slow but can take out enemy turrets at long distance, a support class that can repair bases and heal teammates, and everything in between.

I generally hate F2P gaming for many reasons, but it seems like we might have a winner on our hands with this one. It's not pay to win - buying stuff gets you early access to unlocks, but the weapons are designed to be sidegrades/different rather than a progression, and non-paying players get access to all the stuff that paying players do, just slower.

We'll be playing this weekend, so if you're interested in playing with us, make sure you add me (SenorBeef) to your friends list on steam (the game isn't on steam, you have to get it from that link above, but we still use steam to organize the games), or at least add me (same name) as a friend in the game itself. The link I gave in the first line of the post is a referral link - which means if you end up playing the game I get some bonus XP to unlock stuff with - doesn't hurt you at all, you get the game the same as if you used a generic link. It's about a 2.5gb download, and you can add a shortcut to it in steam so you can use the steam overlay while in game.

We use ventrilo for voice chat and we can teach you how to play the game, so just get ahold of me.

[control-z]

That's cool, I'll check it out. I don't know if I'm just getting old but I wish they would slow these games down about 50%.

[control-z]

I read that it takes forever to earn XP for each weapon but it can be done. One review seems to suggest you don't get all the different classes unless you buy them with real cash. $30 seems to be amount that you reasonably need to spend to get the important things. Is that the case?

[Mekhazzio]

I've been something of a curmudgeon for the Tribes games. I played the first one when it was new, and I really liked it for about a year or so, before the skiing exploit was discovered and popularized, which made 3/4ths of the game content irrelevant. They've never even attempted to recapture the territory control / sensor warfare / combined arms gameplay the first game was intended to have, because the skiing exploit suddenly became sacrosanct and you just can't do those things when people are essentially untouchable 95% of the time.

This new version isn't the Tribes I want (that'll probably be Planetside) but it's the first one that actually feels somewhat playable despite the skiing. The new addition of gobs of not-quite-hitscan automatic weapons means that flinging yourself through the air is no longer total invulnerability. There's still a lot of the old issues from it, like most map areas becoming dead space and open areas being almost completely indefensible. I'm not sure the game design is a success in the long run, but it's the best take on the idea so far, and I'm having fun playing it.

There are some elements of "pay to win" in there. While most major weapons are sidegrades to each other, some are simply superior to the stock versions, especially in the grenade slots. The unlocked perks and armor/pack upgrades aren't an outright win button, but the odds are heavily stacked against you if you're going up against someone who's kitted out when you are not.

The costs for things are astronomical, too. Primary weapons are priced at 100,000 XP each, when a typical 20 minute match gets you around 1000. I know that's the entire basis of the f2p business model, but I don't have to like it. This website is giving away promo codes for unlocking the soldier spinfusor - well worth the bother, at that time cost.

[Mekhazzio]

Originally Posted by control-z

I read that it takes forever to earn XP for each weapon but it can be done. One review seems to suggest you don't get all the different classes unless you buy them with real cash. $30 seems to be amount that you reasonably need to spend to get the important things. Is that the case?

The only items that are available only for money are cosmetic skins. Everything with a gameplay function can be earned in-game.

The class unlocks are priced fairly inexpensively. You can get all of them for about half the price of a single primary weapon.

[SenorBeef]

Game has an 89 metacritic rating right now, which has got to be a record for a F2P game - or rather, a F2P game that was designed to be that way (unlike, say, TF2 which was designed as a pay game and eventually went free).

Although I wish they'd have just sold the game normally for $15 or $20. I have no problem buying games and I find it weird that very low quality F2P games are successful just because people will do anything to avoid spending even a few bucks in a steam sale. But as far as F2P games go, this seems to be the first one that was done fairly well.

[Mekhazzio]

Yeah, I'm not against dropping $10-$25 on it, the production values are really rather high and a lot of work clearly went into the game. I might even wind up tossing some money at it anyway even though I'd feel dirty for justifying a F2P model. I don't think they needed to go F2P and I'm not a big fan of the interminable grind method for unlocking things.

What's surprised me the most, though, is that the community actually isn't the giant load of raging douchebags like you expect from a F2P shooter. I've been reasonably impressed by the chatter I've seen, people seem to be decent sports about things on the whole. I have no idea why this is. Maybe it's the learning curve that's shaped like a cliff?

Edit: Or maybe it's because the player base consists heavily of people who played previous Tribes games, and are thus older than your typical shooter crowd by default? Except Counterstrike's community is pretty horrible, so that's not justification by itself...

[CutterJohn]

I don't mind F2P, I just wish the prices were reasonable. I dropped $50, since hell, why not, its fun, and I'm not much for grinds anyway, but if you figure out the dollar price, the 100k xp guns are are around $7-8.

I don't mind F2P, but dammit if I spend $50 I expect to be able to unlock everything.

[control-z]

I've played 3 sessions of CTF and am very impressed. It is sort of like Tribes but with Unreal Tournament and Battlefield mixed in. I've gotten enough XP to upgrade my soldier weapons a few times. And yes, unlocking new classes is very obtainable. I don't feel hugely mismatched against other players.

[Mekhazzio]

No, it's not a huge disadvantage for the most part. The biggest gap comes from the health regen delay upgrade for armor. If you get in a long fight, the faster delay before regen begins is a game-changer. Fortunately(?), when you're just starting out, the chances of actually getting into a long-drawn out fight with an experienced player are essentially nonexistent

The main problem that gives it a tint of pay-to-win is that the stock item selections seem specifically chosen to start people with an ill-suited loadout that requires unlocks before the classes perform as you'd expect from them.

A stock Pathfinder, for example, is built as a flag runner. If you want to be an effective flag chaser, you -really- want the light assault rifle and thrust pack, and probably the bolt launcher too. A new player would be a lot better off with the chaser kit than the runner kit.

The stock Sentinel is schizo: the weapon is specialized for mobility, but the grenade is specialized for stationary defense. If you want to be defensive, you really need the Phase Rifle.

The Soldier assault rifle is good, but the Spinfusor is unquestionably a better one to start with. It's a lot less mechanically demanding to get at least some damage out with it.

The Technician's SMG is also quite good, but for a class that most players will use to defend the base, the Thumper is just outright superior.

The Doombringer almost requires the Super-Heavy perk to do effective flag defense, and the Mines belt item is very important too.

The stock Infiltrator is probably the worst case of it. The Inf's SMG is the worst bullet weapon in the game while the Jackal is extremely potent. A conspiracy theory abounds that, since it's the current purchase-pack primary weapon, it's intentionally overpowered. It's so blatantly off the scale that the conspiracy theory almost sounds reasonable - there's no way the devs could've missed it.

The Brute and Raider...okay, I can't complain about them. Except maybe that they're both 18k unlocks and thus the most expensive classes to begin with...

[control-z]

I'm confused on gold vs XP. Does gold go away after the match ends, so you might as well spend it on orbital strikes etc?

[SenorBeef]

You don't earn gold, you only buy it. What you get every round for spending on orbital strikes and support stations are credits - and yes, you should spend them, since they only last the round.

[control-z]

Credits, yes that is what I meant. Thanks.

[Mekhazzio]

There's Gold, XP & Credits.

Gold is what you buy with real money. Gold can be spent on unlocks of new classes, items and skins. Skins are only purchasable with gold.

XP is gained during matches by earning "medals" (such as your 250th repair ever) and "accolades" (such as a long-range mortar kill or two kills in quick succession) and possibly some other things. It seems pretty flat. An amazing game doesn't get you an awful lot more XP than just kinda participating in one. I haven't quite figured out how this one works yet. XP can be spent on upgrading existing items, or unlocking new classes & weapons. Upgrades are only purchasable with XP.

Credits are earned during matches and are handed out 1:1 with your score for that game as seen on the scoreboard. Pretty much anything you do, offensively or defensively, will reward credits, and they are proportional to the difficulty/rarity of the feats. Simply hitting someone with a bullet will be a few credits, while killing 5 people at once coughs up 3,000 by itself, plus all the bonuses for the individual kills, plus another bonus for a 5-kill streak, plus all the value of the damage itself, so...a lot. Credits can be spent on upgrading base objects, purchasing vehicles, or using "call-ins" which are a portable inventory station, a small laser strike or a heavy laser barrage, all delivered courtesy of your friends in orbit. Credits do not carry over between games, and do not count towards any persistent rewards (except indirectly, in that buying a jet, tank or orbital strike is likely to net you more XP) so use em or lose em.

[DigitalC]

Man i sucked so bad at this game, specially the skiing. Then i got 250 free point thingies from installing their facebook app and bought the engineer type class. I do a lot better when i can just plop down a turret near the flag and buzz around defending and repairing. I wish i didn't suck so bad at the super fast paced flying around everyone else can do, it looks much funner than the game I'm playing.

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by Mekhazzio

XP is gained during matches by earning "medals" (such as your 250th repair ever) and "accolades" (such as a long-range mortar kill or two kills in quick succession) and possibly some other things. It seems pretty flat. An amazing game doesn't get you an awful lot more XP than just kinda participating in one. I haven't quite figured out how this one works yet. XP can be spent on upgrading existing items, or unlocking new classes & weapons. Upgrades are only purchasable with XP.

Accolades(the stuff like flag defender/gener defender/double kill/base repair/etc) don't give you xp, they just give credits.

XP is rewarded almost entirely based on time, not any performance. The bonus XP is based on your position in the games rankings, plus any long term medals you might receive, but without those medals its at most a 50% boost.

[Mekhazzio]

New patch today. New Raider items and some custom server stuff, mainly.

The more I play it, the more I feel that the game still has serious weaknesses because of using skiing as a core mechanic. While they've done a much better job of implementing it in a playable manner than any other Tribes game to date, by keeping the maximum speeds within the realm of sanity and adding bullet weapons to try to deal with it, skiing still makes the game one-dimensional. The base structures are irrelevant because they can't cope with the speed: even a fully upgraded radar doesn't detect out to enough range to spot someone streaking in, and the turrets are trivial to make miss. It's moot anyway, because the generator is much easier and quicker to destroy than it is to repair or defend. Flag stand defense is near-futile because a tenth of a second window is all that's needed, and the runners can usually make that window themselves on their way in. I can totally see the game taken to high ends of play being nothing but pathfinders, sentinels, and maybe a raider or two, and there's not a lot of ways to address that without going into the fundamentals.

It's fun to play for now, because the pub games haven't grasped the metagame yet, but it's only a matter of time.

If it was me, I'd do something drastic like disable skiing when damage is taken or move the flags indoors...but then most people would say it would no longer be Tribes. Can't really win.

[control-z]

Yeah I think it will be necessary to weaken or slow down the skiiers. Make the turrets more effective vs unarmored, something.

I don't feel the XP grind is too unfair, although I did just pay $10 to become a "VIP" so I get a 50% XP bonus. That will speed my XP grind by 50%.

[control-z]

Man the raiders are bitches now. As if the base defenses weren,t weak enough already. A group of them get inside your generator room and just spam grenades constantly. I couldn't get them out or maybe our team just needed more coordination.

On the plus side I can ski now and got my first flag caps last night. Of course the servers weren't full by that time of night.

[Mekhazzio]

That was pretty common regardless. IMO, the old raider weapons are better at it than the new, plus there's always Juggernauts, Brutes and Jackal Infiltrators. With the way the maps and bases are structured, except for Raindance (a clone of a Tribes 1 map) it's essentially impossible to defend the generator against any determined attack.

The catch is that you don't really need to. If a lot of the enemy is hunkered down inside your base, the best response is not to coordinate a defense to flush them out, it's to simply ignore them and use the time to make a power play. Since the pre-placed base assets are largely useless, all a generator really does for you is power the deployable items, and while those are nice to have, they're far from essential.

[SenorBeef]

Going to try to organize an SDMB game of Tribes tomorrow (Tuesday) around 8-9pm eastern. I'll contact people I know that have the game via steam - if you haven't added me as a friend in tribes, add me - same name. Also make sure you have ventrilo setup.

[Mekhazzio]

I wonder how the matchmaking will handle getting several people in one game.

I have to say, this game's really growing on me, the more I play it. They really did a decent job at making the nutso skiing game actually playable.