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Tribes 2 Classic Part 2 January 12, 2003 Rory McGuire |
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Summary: Rory continues his look at the changes Tribes 2 went through, switching focus for a while to the swanky new Team Rabbit 2 game mode and then summing up his thoughts in a re-review of T2 as it stands now. Funk soul brother, check it out now!
 Team Rabbit 2 | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
The lowdown
Codality, a mod team whose members were drawn from two competitive tribes, was contracted by Sierra to craft Team Rabbit 2. The goal of Team Rabbit 2 is to create a graceful and more concise game than CTF. An entirely different gametype and mod, Team Rabbit 2 features different physics and though the weapons and other factors are similar, their blast radii, speed and damages are tweaked to benefit the game.
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The premise of Team Rabbit 2 is two teams vie for a single flag, this flag can only be carried for 15 seconds by a player before they begin taking damage. To prevent said damage you need to mix it up and pass it to a teammate. Passes, depending on their height, hang time, positions of passer/receiver and many other factors are then worth assigned a certain amount of points. A grab on the ground going slowly will yield 1 point, a pass that hangs in the air for 20 seconds, travels 700 meters, and is thrown by a passer traveling at full speed and caught by a receiver backwards can yield up to 72 points. Sounds complex, but it doesn’t end there. These points are not awarded to the team, but instead, go into a jackpot which reaches up to 250 points. Players can cash in the jackpot by driving it to an enemy’s goal stand and shooting it in.
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Team Rabbit 2 in many ways plays like an aerial version of hockey, with style being rewarded over brutality [Rory must be thinking of that sissy Russian hockey, not good, hard-nosed Canadian stuff. –ed.]. Aside from the scoring aspect of TR2, there are also other means to accumulate points for your team. Possession time of the flag for example, will give a minimal amount of points to a team every second, not enough to win a game, but enough to put you a few points above another if its close. Teams repeatedly passing the flag back and forth, while keeping possession and doing different passes can also gain creativity bonuses which are direct bonuses to a team’s score. The final method of accumulating points is the one-timer. A variation on the solo goal, a one timer consists of passing to a team-mate who holding his throw button will then perform a slapshot into the goal. The one-timer is then worth an extra 50 points on top of what the jackpot is cashed in for.
SIDEBAR: Seriously guys, I’m not kidding. Rory has a real fetish for big pages. I don’t know what’s up with that kid… ask him.
| TR2 Part Deux | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
Gameplay
If you’ve played Bombing Run for UT2k3 you’ll know roughly what Team Rabbit 2 plays like. Just toss in a jetpack, the ability to roar across the landscape and the rewards for style and you have a downright amazing game. Many a constraint has been placed on Team Rabbit 2 to keep the game fast paced and small. The out of bounds grid for example, nothing foreign to T2, has now been changed to act as an accelerator of sorts, where players can do grid bounces to bring themselves back into the field of play. There are also a few other objects tossed in to act as accelerators, such as jump-pads and cannons which you can use to shoot yourself across the air like a circus freak. Some other variables have been tweaked as well, water for example is an entirely different entity than as it appears in Classic or traditional Tribes 2. Water acts as an accelerator due to its buoyancy, and players will actually gain quite a bit of speed traveling through water.
TR2 combatants also cannot be killed, you can knock a player down for a few seconds, similar to checking someone in hockey, but the only way a tribesman can be forced to re-spawn is if he suicides.
What this all adds up to is an incredibly fast paced game, faster than even classic, that performs something like an aerial ballet, you might get knocked out of the action, but you’ll be up seconds later disk jumping into the air to catch a pass.
Roles and numbas
With all the various mechanisms in mind, the game fits perfectly with a small number of people, in fact three on three is not just playable, but incredible. The max set by the mod is 6vs6, but a server can allow for spectators who can wait in line to join and watch the action as it goes on from the flag’s perspective, which is a nice touch. Admins can also toss more players in but its rarely necessary, 6vs6 is an absolutely perfect number, individual players truly shine, and you’ll rapidly be picking up on the right team-mates to pass to and the ones to pass over.
Each player can assume any number of roles, most bearing a strong similarity to a number of sports. A player within a certain proximity to the goal will become a defenseman, changing from the traditional light armor to medium armor, allowing for easier catches, he’ll also receive a tweaked shocklance which is solely a knockback weapon, sending people flying away. Get inside the goal and a player, and only one, will become the goalie, a heavy armor suit twice the size of standard heavies, equipped with a knockback mortar and the shocklance to send people flying. The goalie is the last line of defense, and despite its immense size, can only occupy a third of the goal at the most ideal moment.
All of these roles juggle seamlessly based on proximity. You don’t have to sign up to be a goalie, you don’t have to go to an inventory station. If someone is flying in on your goal you can disk jump to beat him there and once you land on the goal crease you’ll switch from being a light into the goalie.
SIDEBAR: Whenever I load up Team Rabbit 2 the only thing I can think about is the scene in Roger & Me where Michael Moore is talking to the crazy rabbit lady while she is beating the rabbit to death and then proceeds to skin it while chatting him up. I’m scarred for life.
| Team Rabbit 2 Continued | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
Maps maps maps
TR2 enjoys a number of custom maps, the original seven in the patch with a few more available by independent authors. These maps are decent, half of them are quite fun, the other half are either too large or too hostile to the player-base to be enjoyed by most pub players. Visibility on all these maps is through the roof, offering somewhere around 700 or more meters of long distance range.
This high visibility creates some problems for weaker machines however. Unlike some other games, the fog in Tribes 2 actually serves to improve FPS. For a low-end machine, Team Rabbit 2 might keep them at a crippled FPS, though on our 1.4 Gigahertz, GeForce 3 machine, it was entirely playable.
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Physical
Codality experimented with a number of different gameplay variables to get the physics model they wanted for Team Rabbit 2. In fact, the size of models was doubled, and all landscape was thereby doubled, in order to get a more appropriate physics model.
Players have to get used to the changes to the physics engine in TR2 to properly do the high-flying aerial shenanigans. With the release of Classic and TR2, there’s nearly a half dozen major physics models to learn. We’re not talking entirely different games as these aren’t total conversions, but the subtleties and intricacies add up.
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This detail has partially fractured the player base of T2. There are so many mods, with so many followings all playing a comparable game, it seems any coder with a knowledge of derivative C languages has tried his hand at making a balanced mod for Tribes 2, and all it’s really done is reduce the overall competition on most servers.
Team Rabbit 2 for example enjoys a good 200 people playing it at one time at most, usually this number is far lower. Far too many people are not interested in learning yet another physics model to get into it. The same is true of most of these mods, with a good several hundred players all latching onto their Tribes tweak of choice.
This serves to not only make the games less competitive but it will also limit your server choices to one or two North American/Australian/European servers with people on it. Fortunately Team Rabbit 2 is entirely playable with only a few people per team, as we mentioned earlier, but it still lacks server choices if you wish to play another map or don’t like your team.
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Team-play
Unlike Classic, where a single player can do quite a bit of damage on his own, Team Rabbit 2 is entirely team-based. If you are lightyears above your pubbing teammates, you’re going to feel it. Without at least a slightly skilled partner, even the most amazing player will either find it impossible or very difficult to shine. The reliance on passing, and teammates who can get themselves in the air to catch passes will limit even the finest player and his passing/receiving game.
Good players can still find themselves in the air intercepting opponent’s passes, but forget about setting up a one timer shot or a long series of passes amongst teammates if they lack the awareness you may have.
When TR2 is played with even just one talented teammate, it truly begins to shine. There are very few experiences comparable to lobbing a 700 meter pass to be caught by a reversed teammate. One of the design principals behind TR2 was achieving the fast pace and adrenaline of organized sports, and under ideal conditions they achieve it in spades. The game never stops and never slows down until the map timer runs out. Even when a player forces himself to respawn, he is back in action in literally seconds.
On top of some of the adrenaline inducing aspects of TR2, it’s also one of the first FPSes of its type, where grace, dynamism and intelligence are rewarded more than brutality. Most FPSes seem to center around blowing something or someone up, in TR2 if you just duel your opponents, you are doing your team a profound disservice. Learning when to get in the air, when to crash to the ground, when to race downfield or cluster the goal is as important in TR2 as shooting your disk-launcher accurately.
SIDEBAR: Tribalwar is home to one of the finest internet pranks of all time. A patron of Tribalwar, shortly after 9/11, examined footage of the Twin Towers burning and noticed a face bearing a strong similarity to a devil in the smoke and debris. He posted a picture of this image, and there was quite a bit of feedback in the thread. A few days later CNN.com ran a story about it, but instead of following traditional internet etiquette and hosting the image on their own servers, they linked to Tribalwar’s image host. When a Tribalwar admin noticed millions of extra image views per day hitting Tribalwar from CNNh, e replaced the devil image with a picture of a man holding his anus open for a camera (the infamous goatse!). The Tribalwar admins estimated 300,000 unique IPs from CNN saw the image before they hosted the devil picture on their own servers.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Pros
Graphics. Though very little has changed about the T2 graphical engine besides improved framerate, the game is still easily one of the most impressive engines handling outdoor terrain. The only engine which can come close is Battlefield 1942.
Playability. Tribes 2 offers a Tribes game for just about every player. If you still like the slower gameplay of Tribes 2 Base nothing is stopping you, or hundreds of other players a night, from playing it – with a significantly reduced bug count.
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Balance. Classic has returned quite a bit of balance in offense and defense, the game has simply become lightyears more fun as a result, with the entirety of the game being played as it was meant to be.
Level design. There are literally dozens of great maps. Old T1 players will see some of their classic Tribes 1 maps returned to the game, as well as dozens of other new engaging and original maps. This is a refreshing change to some of the abominations of level design that the first incarnation of T2 shipped with.
Netcode. Despite a different, and somewhat quirky netcode, Tribes 2 still maintains the finest netcode to be found in any of the current generation online shooters. Even the newer netcodes of BF1942 and UT2K3 feel primitive in comparison.
Uniqueness. The Tribes franchise is still to this day one of the most unique of the first person shooters, nothing really comes close, even 4+ years after the first game’s release.
Price. If you can find T2 odds are its gonna be 5-10 dollars. We’d probably pay 5-10 dollars for a 90 meg expansion alone, but its absolutely free, and provides hours of content.
Customizability. Tribes has enjoyed quite a bit of user-related content over the years. From the several different gameplay mods giving you your taste of what Tribes should play like, to countless scripts, skins and more.
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Cons
Not your father’s Tribes. Despite the best efforts of the various mod and coding teams to return towards Tribes 1 while preserving T2 gameplay, this is still not your father’s Tribes. Some of the best elements of the first Tribes have been brought back, but those select hardcore players insisting on Tribes 1 with T2 graphics won’t find it here.
Bugs. While nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were, Tribes 2 still has bugs, and still suffers from a number of the same problems with simply reduced frequency. A number of new bugs have surfaced as well. For a patch that was in an open beta state for two or more months with the principal goal being to kill the bugs, we’re somewhat disappointed.
Player base. Tribes 2’s player base has seen the vision of dozens of men sure of the Tribes’ franchise’s future. This has served to fracture the minor player base into even smaller factions.
SIDEBAR: The black and red weapon skins shown in the screenshots can be found here. The Usagi Yojimbo TR2 flag can be found here. And the “BAM!” disc explosion can be found here along with other 60s era Batman related goodies.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |