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Tribes: Ascend also going free to play
by Andrew Yoon, Jun 27, 2011 4:15pm PDTTribes: Ascend is being billed as "the multiplayer successor to the much lauded Tribes 2." Built on Unreal Engine 3, Ascend will be a downloadable multiplayer shooter for PC and Xbox 360. And, surprisingly, it will also be free-to-play.
Yes, like Team Fortress 2 and many MMOs, the game will be entirely powered by microtransactions. According to a report by IGN, Ascend is largely inspired by League of Legends' cycling release of warriors. In Riot's game, new "champions" are made available for purchase every two weeks, for about $5-10. Tribes: Ascend will, instead, allow players to buy entire loadouts. One loadout may give players more engineer-type attributes, while another may focus more on stealth. Developer Hi-Rez is hoping to create new loadouts on a regular basis, in addition to making cosmetic enhancements available for purchase as well.
Given the competitive nature of online multiplayer, Hi-Rez faces an uphill battle with making Tribes: Ascend a free-to-play game. In spite of the purchasable loadouts, gamers need to be assured that matches will always be balanced. On the other hand, Hi-Rez must constantly come up with new ways of ensuring gamers are incentivize to buy more. It's an interesting experiment, and definitely a sign of things to come.
Comments
Built on Unreal Engine 3, Tribes: Ascend is a downloadable multiplayer shooter for PC and Xbox 360, billed as a "multiplayer successor" to Tribes 2. And, surprisingly, it will also be free-to-play.
Built on Unreal Engine 3, Tribes: Ascend is a downloadable multiplayer shooter for PC and Xbox 360, billed as a "multiplayer successor" to Tribes 2. And, surprisingly, it will also be free-to-play. : Shacknews
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The game is no longer skill-based. Everyone should buy into the same game, with the same options.
I don't even like the idea of "unlocking" better equipment. I remember playing Crysis 2 multiplayer and everyone had the best load-out equipped and I was at a supreme disadvantage, even though I'm really really good at first person shooters (my aim is just really good, from years of practice). But when I'm up against a group of heavily armored, invisible dudes, I could dance around them peppering them with bullets and they would just shrug it off and kill me with one shot.
And this caveat goes both ways with me. When I would unlock incredible guns in CoD, it became less of a challenge because I would just rule the map - it got easy and boring, fast.
Some people need that feeling of getting something for their time. But it's a game. All you should get is the FUN OF PLAYING IT, then you should put the game down and move on with your normal life, looking back fondly at the time you spent. BUT NO - now it's about how many points you have and stuff you've unlocked. That's not fun, and it hardly takes skill. This, along with developers making games easier so that they are more widely accessible (to draw a wider crowd - for more profit, of course), and no longer does skill have much to do with games any more.
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