Overview

Beginnings of disaster

As of March, it will be two years since Tribes 2’s official release. Players of the original Tribes had been long eager for a resurrection of their technologically outdated but profoundly fun addiction, and when Dynamix announced their intent to create a sequel the masses cheered. The cheering stopped however, when Dynamix finally did release Tribes 2. For the veteran of the Tribes franchise, Tribes 2 crept along at a turtle’s pace. Cloud soaring heavy offense was no longer, and cappers reaching the atmosphere at break-neck speeds were a thing of the past. Moreover, Dynamix had increased the effectiveness of vehicles and turrets exponentially, and thus the man on man combat and gameplay was lost to shrikes and tanks. Initially the game was quite buggy and hostile to a number of video cards. The Voodoo series of cards, the choice for the original Tribes and what most veterans had, ran T2 at an average 15 frames per second. Even the Voodoo 5, then a technological marvel, ran T2 like Dom DeLuise runs a 10 kilometer marathon.

Chasing a capper through a tunnel

Snowy landscape

Incoming hostiles!

The veteran Tribes players almost whole-heartedly rejected Tribes 2, if not at release, then a few months later. The players new to Tribes, however, quickly became infatuated with what they perceived as speed, vehicles, and team-based gameplay. The game was sound on its own account, and those new to it latched onto it the same way Q2 players adored their game while the original Quake players were holding back bile, it was simply a matter of choice. Tribes 2 was slower, and some folks enjoyed it.

These new players would also become alienated over time, as each time Dynamix patched Tribes 2, they created more and more problems. An error called an unhandled exception began appearing with more and more frequency. It was the lucky players who experienced the unhandled exception, as a number of players couldn’t even update their T2 client as numerous problems cropped up there as well. On top of that Dynamix was changing the physics almost weekly, speeding it up, slowing it down, doing both, reverting to prior patches and more. Stores began reporting returned copies of Tribes 2 in droves, and some altogether forsook the title, removing it from their shelves. Disaster finally struck when the Dynamix team was laid off by Sierra. Several months later, the average primetime population for Tribes 2 was several hundred players, down from a few thousand simultaneous players the game had enjoyed around release just a half year before.

Bat's raining ascension

Badass flag stand

Going up

The weasel arrives

A few months after the majority of the Tribes community said their R.I.P.s for Dynamix, and had given their D.O.A. opinions on the Tribes franchise, a fellow emerged known as Marweas, or Sierra’s Tribes Brand Manager Alex Rodberg. Marweas, dubbed the Weasel, regularly posted to the cynical Tribalwar gathering information on what had left players with a bad taste in their mouths. Occasionally Marweas received a hearty “STFU no one cares” but after months of diligence, it became apparent he was dedicated to a future for the Tribes franchise.

The realization came in part when Sierra flew a number of the top Tribes player and community icons up to Seattle to partake in a conference discussing the future of the Tribes franchise, and what made T2 such the partial (or complete) disaster it was. The gathering of Tribes players, composed of scripters, server and webpage admins, competitive players and icons, met for a weekend fleshing through the problems. During the course of this conference, Sierra contracted a number of the players for a last patch, coupled with the efforts of Garage Games to handle the major technical aspects of the engine. The product of this contracting would be a squelching of bugs by Garage Games, and an addition of two Tribes 1 idyllic mods: Team Rabbit 2, and Tribes 2 Classic done by players of the game.

We're surrounded by liquid hot MAG-MA

Back to me mistah!

Chain whoring

Sierra’s final patch for Tribes 2 was released a month or so ago, and after playing the ever loving crap out of it, we’ve decided to put it in the scope. Considering how ubiquitous Tribes 2’s release was, and how significant the gameplay changes in the mods available in the latest patch, we’ll be focusing mostly on changes.