If you release in early access, perhaps expect players not being ready to jump into a buggy, in-development competitive shooter?
Only early access games I’ll pick up are ones where it’s not PvP and I doubt I’m alone in that.
Bizarre they’re effectively treating the game as “released” and studying telemetry yet when players see “early access”, they see it as “beta” and not actually released.
I think you’re hitting the nail on the head. A lot of publishers are blatantly misusing EA to put out an unfinished piece of software to socialize the testing, and hope for a more understanding playerbase because of the EA status. Not only is it manipulative, it also skews reception like it does here. Personally, I categorically skip all EA because I only buy finished products. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be interested in a good tribes game.
To say that EVERYONE saw this coming may be an understatement. The moment the devs teased taking out the Honorball game mode and spinning it off into a completely separate game, the writing was on the wall. Possibly my favorite shooter series and it seems to be stuck in development purgatory. Even the unofficial Tribes-likes and other FPS-Z games can’t ever seem to find their footing.
Shazbot!
Maybe they should remove the big Early Access banner from the store page if the game is actually finished. I liked it when it first launched and had the free play weekend, but I wasn’t going to spend the $30-40 it cost for a single map on an unfinished game.
And I mean even back in the hay days of Tribes 2, it was sort of a niche game.
I was interested in the game, but for me the problem really was the skill level of the player base. Getting killed 20 times before getting a kill is no fun at all. I played during the test period, and I think it definitely would be fun with other noobs, but every game just has people in it who are miles above the rest.
They actually had a neat solution to that in the form of some basic bots to help fill in for under-queued matches. Not too different from what Splitgate had going on (man, I miss that one too!) It gave beginners something to chew on a little bit. Would have been nice to have custom server options to tune bots and matches, like in Tribes 2. Apparently that kind of thing is simply too much to ask for.
Yeah the bots were fine. I definitely liked splitgate more than the new tribes though. Even against humans I felt like I had way more chance to get some kills and overall the game felt more polished.
Tribes 3 was missing all the secondary objectives stuff that made T2 so much more accessible. Even if you weren’t snapping crazy midair shots or cruising through fast flag caps you could still contribute via base attack or defense, vehicle support, etc. It felt like a crazy mix of arena shooter and early Battlefield games.
