...or it could be that he's only frequenting forums with rabid tribes 2 fans that wouldn't have been pleased even if Carmen Electra had come over to their house in a thong and hand fed them grapes while they played.
Whoa now. I wasn't a rabid Tribes 2 fan at all. I thought it was an initially awful, buggy, unbalanced game that
eventually developed into a solid experience. I'm a fan of the first Tribes, which I consider to be the best multiplayer first-person shooter experience availible on the PC to date.
The problem with Tribes 3 is that I can't even see a good game peeking through, like it was with Tribes 2. If you bought 2 on day one like I did, you could tell there just *might* be a good game there if it'd run over 5 frames per second. It turns out that was the case--with the final patch applied, Tribes 2 is a different-but-still-satisfying experience in the Tribes series.
Tribes 3, on the other hand, works as advertised. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about what the game is. After spending several hours with the multiplayer beta, I can safely conclude the game's about as deep as an average bathroom sink.
Things Irrational dropped the ball on:
-Both the total weapon count and total pack count have been severly cut down. (Totally unacceptable. If the limited number of guns each had an alternate-fire mode, I'd be happy. But they don't. Plus the new rocket-launcher deal is total crap against, well, anything.)
-Failed, annoying attempt to make Medium armor more attractive. (The Buckler
sucks. I was never killed by it, nor did I ever make a kill with it. Additionally, you spawn in Medium. Lights had their HP castrated, but that doesn't matter much, as a skilled, agile player in a Light will still school a Medium or a Heavy as long as the Light isn't caught off-guard.)
-There is only one kind of grenade. (Sure, the heat/flares system in Tribes 2 was annoying and contrived, but there were good ideas in the other grenades--flashbangs should have stayed in, and I would have loved to see an EMP-like grenade since they removed the ELF).
-There's a wacko deployable system whereby a light can smuggle an auto-turrent into the enemy base since he can use an energy pack at the same time as carrying a deployable. (This is nuts. Irrational shouldn't have tried to 'fix' the Medium armor, they should have instead tooled the rules to fit what players have used Medium armor for all along: deployment/engineer jobs. Medium armor should be the ONLY armor able to use deployables, though they can carry two at once. Another idea would be to give Mediums a bonus to repair speed when repairing base objects.)
-Jump jet juice is WAY reduced, leading to hasty, unelegant duels more reminiscent of UT2k4 or Half-Life DM than Tribes. (This is a crying shame. The armor 'feels' appropriately lighter or heavier now, but you don't have enough juice to do anything with. Irrational could have kept the 'feel' of each armor--perhaps different acceleration/momentum rules for each suit--without ruining how much jump jet juice we get.)
-Skiing is totally borked. (Hold down space and you activate your "skis," which basically means you slide on any terrain--flat, angled, whatever. Fail to hold down space, though, and you stop dead, often taking damage. As if having to scream "GO GO GADGET SKIS!" whenever you want to move around the map isn't bad enough, even the
slightest bump will stop you dead or send you careening off in a totally different direction. Great job, Irrational.)
-The melee weapon is now totally useless. (Jesus, at least make it an insta-kill from behind, like in T2).
The best thing I can say about Tribes 3 is that it made me want to go back and play Tribes and Tribes 2 again. Irrational didn't try to make a Tribes sequel, they tried to make "Baby's First Tribes," a UT2k4 jetpack mod that removed the elements of the first two games that seperated the new players from the experienced ones. Now everyone's on the same playing field--the problem is, there's no room for anyone to improve. If you've captured the flag at least once in your T:V career, chances are you're as good as you're going to get at the game--which is NOT the experience veteran players were looking for.
