Reply With QuoteThe single-player mode is more or less a long training campaign for multiplayer, but it's certainly worth $15.
Tribes: Vengence is currently part of Gogamer.com's 48-hour madness sale program, so I thought I'd ask around here for opinions.
Are there still people playing online? Was the single-player mode worth it?
The single-player mode is more or less a long training campaign for multiplayer, but it's certainly worth $15.
What he said. No matter what you think of multiplayer, the single player campaign is worth your $15.
If you liked tribes 2- no it's not worth it. It is horrible and nothing that was good from the original game was kept in this POS.
As much as I like the Freedom Force games, Irrational DROPPED THE BALL on Tribes bigtime.
It surprises me that there is (apparently) no way to play a botmatch in Tribes:Vengeance. That seems like something basic. Maybe a mod maker could do it?
I ordered mine yesterday.
T: V was excellent. Big time Tribes player here, and they were indeed loyal. Its got a bit of Unreal Tournament to it, but its still the Tribes I know and love.
And of course they couldn't be completely identical to a game that came out years ago - that'd be stupid. Gameplay has advanced, and T: V a better game. Tribes 2 sucked, anyways.
As the bots that were made for Tribes by the community and the bots that shipped with T2 prove, it's anything but "basic" to make good bots for a game with jetpacks. :)
The community for T:V is moribund and a patch first announced in November of last year has still not arrived and is apparently caught up in a dispute between various parties. VUG won't even acknowledge the patch now, refusing to say anything publicly about it. The community (as evidenced even in this thread) excels at tearing itself apart.
But if you don't mind a game with a fairly small playerbase, frantic play and no real cheat protection, T:V is still fun. The single player is well worth the price even if you never do the multiplayer.
I say it's still worth the $, but ultimately I didn't stick with T:V and went back to T2. I might play T:V if someone can get Siege going there but I'm not holding my breath.
You mean fully x,y,z AI? Descent managed it over 10 years ago. And did it well.Originally Posted by RobotPants
Skiing is a whole nother matter.You mean fully x,y,z AI? Descent managed it over 10 years ago. And did it well.
Even though I was a giving them all the room in the world to change stuff around during development, after an initial flirtation, I've come to think that Irrational really boned this one up. Maybe someday I can work up enough care to get into the nitty-gritty, but suffice it to say they built a game around the single, dominant style of competitive play; a mistake, because it removed that type of fast-paced play from the slower, but more strategic overgame.
But I got $15 worth of fun out it, sure (too bad I payed $50).
IMHO it's best to ignore all the bitter Tribes 2 players; if you like shooters and are not a competitive Tribes 2 player the single player campaign is great, and multiplayer should be fun too with the right group of players.
Yeah, the single-player game is good fun. There's some excellent writing in it - like turning the tutorial into a mean-spirited joke for the Tribals to play on the good little Imperial princess, or the clicking from character to character. It's really well done, even if some of the missions do go on too long.
If you mean the Starsiege Mod, the dev teams have moved to the Torque Shader Engine a while back :) (which some of you might have seen at the GG presentation in the ATI corner, or at the GG booth at GDC)I might play T:V if someone can get Siege going there but I'm not holding my breath.
http://www.garagegames.com/news/7208
I was thinking of the Siege game type with which I really became enamored, but I'm looking forward to the StarSiege developments too.
Don't know what the online community is like these days, but I'd say the game is easily worth $12.90.
The single-player was suprisingly good IMO. It may have been "one long training mission" but the storyline stayed interesting as did the overall gameplay. Some of the dialogue was cornball but its no worse than anything else out there at the moment. Well worth the $12.50
Tribes: Vengeance 1.1 Update - Cancelled
Today VUG officially announced that the next patch for T:V - originally due in December - is now canceled, along with any future support from the game.
I'd be interested in how the Irrational guys feel about this, although it's completely understandable if none of them wanted to speak publicly about it.
I noticed that a number of mods are switching from the Tribes: Vengeance engine to the Torque engine. The popular Renegades mod posted a list of their reasons for doing so and after reading it I can't blame them.
So I bought T:V from Gogamer and it arrived a few days ago. Played through the single player and tried a few games online and while I don't regret spending $12.90 on it, Tribes: Vengeance does make me appreciate Tribes 2 in ways I never did before.
The single player experience was somewhat uneven for me in terms of difficulty level, with some levels being ridiculously easy and others designed specifically to kill the player as quickly as possible.
The storyline was interesting, and the jumps fowards and backwards in time to tell the story were relatively well executed. I wasn't too keen on some of the design choices.
Some armor looks great, while others, such as Julia's cat suit and clunky 80s moonboots or the overall extremely clunky boxy design of the Imperial armor, annoyed me. The overuse of pipes with flashing lights to, I guess, portray energy racing through them just looked cheap.
This game makes a strong case against use of rag dolls, which worked great when an enemy character is killed while in flight and goes spinning around due to uncontrolled jump jets, but once on the ground they suffered from having far too little inertia and merely bumping into them is enough to cause a corpse to go skidding across the floor like a plastic bag caught in a strong wind.
As for vehicles, they should have been left out completely. The assault ship wasn't too bad. The fighters were okay, though harder to control and reminded me too much of Cobra's Trouble Bubbles. The land vehicles, however, were just outright bad. The rovers controlled horribly and the tanks were nearly useless on the same hilly terrain that makes for good skiing, to the point where they had to add on the obvious jump-jet hack just to allow them to go most places that weren't reasonably flat.
As for multiplayer, the lack of updates and support combined with a good deal of cheats, lack of mods and so forth have resulted in a rather bleak server landscape.
3 out of 5: Not an unreasonable purchase for $15 or less of a few days of single-player fun, but an easily skipped game otherwise.
I thought it was great, then again I didn't get any sand in my vagina.
LOLDevelopment on the previously announced Tribes: Vengeance 1.1 update has been cancelled. No further updates to Tribes: Vengeance are planned.
That'll make a rabid fanbase happy. Hey Irrational, money so tight over there that ya can't do a "make the customers happy" patch?
--scharmers
--who has played like 0.0 hours of any Tribes, so who cares
Well the rabid fanbase isn't very big so I doubt VU cares much. Vengence dropped in price pretty fast so it didn't seem to catch on very well.
I don't anything could make the Tribes fanbase happy, to be honest.
Patches cost money. Potentially quite a bit of money, depending on how many people are involved. The ROI, even considering such nebulous things as goodwill, is most likely low to nonexistent.
Also: I would hardly expect any game developer to air any dirty laundry they might have here. :roll:
Kool Moe Dee, I'm not looking for dirty laundry nor was I specifically asking that people from Irrational post juicy gossip here on Quarter to Three. No need to pull out the ol' rolling eyes emoticon. :)
To perhaps phrase it more clearly, I'd be interested in reading a post-mortem on the game that included reflections on the post-release as well. Maybe one day we'll see that, maybe we won't. I'm just curious about the process, that's all.
I agree with your assessment of the Tribes fanbase. I think VUG really wanted to draw in new players with things like the single player campaign. Guy Welch has said it only met about one-third of its projected sales, though. Pretty much the end of the franchise.
I'm bummed. Of course, I was totally uninvolved in the creation of T:V, and don't really know any details even if I wanted to air them publically. But I think it's reasonable to be a bit sad about this.
It seems to me like quite a bit of the "rabid fanbase" simply rejected the game upon launch. At least, from what I saw...
The Tribes fans are weird and divided between those who want 'cowboy' hot dogging and those who want more tactical stuff. I'm beginning to think that they're (we're) also jaded, having experienced a game a generation or two ahead of everything else at the time with a level of play that was approaching that of a non-virtual sport.
So basically, we'll never be happy, unless someone makes T1 again with minor upgrades.
That won't make the Tribes community happy, either. T:V was basically Tribes with minor upgrades and look how that turned out. Of course, the lack of support didn't help, but people complained from day one. I think the problem with the Tribes fans is that they got a surprisingly fantastic game with the first one that came seemingly out of nowhere and caused them to fall in love and defined what a multiplayer game should be like to them. I know that's what happened to me.
Tribes 2, for the most part, didn't live up to the most staunch Tribes supporters' expectations for the sole reason that it wasn't Tribes 1. They then fell into a place where they wanted a better Tribes 1, but not Tribes 1 and not Tribes 2. They wanted different, but nobody could ever define exactly how different it was supposed to be. If it was just Tribes with better graphics, they yelled about new content. If there was new content, they yelled that it was too different.
T:V was just a clusterfuck because at that point, all the little factions of Tribes fans wanting different, undefined things in the next game just showed that there would never be enough people firmly in a single camp to make the game a success if new people weren't brought in. Since VUG failed to bring in enough new people, well, we're sitting here now with the end of support of the game and most likely the end of the franchise.
But to answer the original question, yes, Tribes: Vengeance is worth $12.90. The single player campaign is actually very well done, much to the dismay of the hardcore multiplayer Tribes elite.
I agree with your assessment of the fractured community, but could list about a dozen ways that T:V deviated from the T1/T2 template in fundamental ways.
It's near and dear to me, though, so maybe it's best I just put it behind me. I do think the Irrational folks had the best intentions for the direction of the game, but I (and many others) probably didn't want the same game that Michael Johnston wanted. The amount of fun I had in the beta is a testament to how much they did get right.
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