One of the best and most innovative FPS franchises and games ever!!! Jetpacks and 64-128+ player capability
Tribes has always had easy access to in game voice commands, team/global chat, command map access and functionality, large outdoor multiplayer maps, great vehicle integration, different classes, customizable character load outs with hotkey presets, numerous user created maps-mods-skins-voicepacks-utilities, and many fully functional gameplay modes right out of the box.
64-120+ multiplayer? tribes has had this since 1998, yet people releasing games even now talk about how they are going to support 32-64 player games online. wow, amazing, it should be a given you are doing this...do something impressive like a couple hundred per battle and this might be worth mentioning in your promo materials.
What's more: you get a jetpack, adding a whole different axis of play to the game. This is what makes tribes the fantastic game it is. this unfortunately is also one of the curses of the tribes games...as trying to learn how to play effectively online with a jetpack is beyond the skillset or patience of many of the quake/doom/bf crowd. If people would take a couple hours to get the hang of using the jetpack and skiing then they would find their online experience much more enjoyable.
So what prevents tribes from having a decent amount of players online?:
1. difficulty, many just give up before really giving the game a chance. (this does not mean I want it nerfed in any way whatsoever, just a statement of fact)
2. the population for tribes2 and unfortunately for tribes 1 to a large extent is just not there, which is not encouraging for those just logging on. Therefore new players have less incentive now to stay online with tribes 1 and 2.
3. and in the case of tribes 2, the developer seems to have been on a mission to jack the game around, currently the game won't launch and gets stuck in an authentication screen, therefore not allowing players to access the in game browser. Instead of releasing a simple patch to eliminate this part of the game launch, the issue is left hanging since Dynamix went buh bye.
-There is an easy work around to this, but it has no doubt deterred a number of people from logging in and playing tribes2. One way to fix this if you are having issues logging in to tribes 2 is to right click on your tribes 2 online shortcut, select properties, and in the “target” field paste this: C:\Dynamix\Tribes2\GameData\tribes2.exe –online
-or if you have your tribes2 in a different folder just add the final part to the end: -online
-Tribes 2 is one of my all time favorites and still one of the best games around(albeit with no population), and I still log on once a week or so hoping to find a full or even semi-full pub which is sadly never available.
When I am talking about tribes I mean tribes 1 and tribes 2, not the abomination known as Tribes Vengeance which was so abysmal all support for the game was dropped before a single patch was released, and prior to the game even being out a year.
If you can manage to find a full pub, nothing beats having 60-120 people on a server with tanks and fighters fighting it out, while troopers jet in for flag caps and various unfortunates get blown into fragments by bombers.