Tribes Ascend video

The timing is the same whether it’s “hold spacebar” or “murder spacebar”, though. The skill involved is knowing when to ski, finding the best path, how much to use your jets, etc. Using the skiing mod for Tribes didn’t improve my play at all, but it did improve the life expectancy of my keyboard by a decent amount.

I don’t remember skiing being a button-mashing thing, as the timing of the button presses was important (hence my comparison to QW bunnyhopping, which is a similar deal). Did it change?

It’s easier to time the button press if you are hitting it constantly.

For Tribes 1 and 2 there was timing involved for when you started pressing the jump button as you hit the terrain, yes. But other than that, you always just rapidly pressed jump to accelerate as you slid along. Zodd’s ski script was so popular because it removed the need to do that. Tribes: Vengeance allowed skiing by holding down the button as well.

And man, I’m really starting to hope this game turns out well. I don’t know if I would enjoy another Tribes game or not, but thinking about how different the whole skiing/jetpack play was makes me want to give it a shot. Tribes is the first multiplayer game I really, truly loved.

That’s not what I mean by “timing”. If you fuck the timing up you fuck the action up. I don’t remember skiing being something that was particularly friendly to button mashing without paying attention to timing. And if it is, then yeah - no problems with switching it to a newer model.

QW’s bunnyhopping was something that broke if you didn’t time it properly, so it was a skill.

There was a lot of timing involved with how you used your jetpack, but skiing was mostly just tapping the button to build up speed.

Also, there is still no greater satisfaction to be had in any game than blasting someone in mid-air with the spinfusor.

I’m amazed that anyone didn’t use a script for skiing in T1 beyond the first few weeks…

I was never good at the midair disk thing (satisfying, but rare) but I could mine-disk and mortar pretty well, and Tribes started my streak of generally being a complete jerk with deployable turrets.

No, even in Tribes 2, your character would bounce up from the ground when holding space every time he made contact.

In THIS video, it’s like you’re actually engaging some stupid skiis where you stick to the ground and just slide with momentum, instead of gaining momentum from bouncing off surfaces at different angles, etc.

I don’t know if I get what you mean by bouncing. Tapping jump repeatedly while sliding down a slope caused the ski effect in both the first two Tribes games. I can’t tell by these videos what the player’s doing to accomplish the skiing, but if you can ski in Ascend while just holding a button on any surface, then yes that would be lame.

That’s how skiing worked in Tribes: Vengeance, if I recall, though skiing on a flat surface obviously didn’t yield much momentum.

Right, it was sort of like a “make your feet slippery” button.

New Gamescom video (interview with Todd Harris)

So I got to play this game at PAX today. This game is Tribes in all its glory. The game felt perfect - the skiing, the jetpacks, the spinfusor, and more. Absolutely massive levels with vehicles. This game was pure Tribes as we all want to be created.

What’s funny is that the announcer during the tournament constantly referred to this game as being based on Tribes 1 and 2, and that we should forget those other Tribes games ever existed

I also randomly talked to one of the developers there, commenting on the game. He said that the art lead has heard the feedback of the guns being way too big, that’s getting changed. Woo!

Previewed. The future is bright!

Fine. Don’t trust my impressions! Wait for a hands on from examiner.com!

cries

Missed your PAX post, LMN8R. It is indeed encouraging. The gigantic weapons thing reminds me of the first previews for UT2003, which had the same complaints – and end result. :)

The ‘absolutely massive levels’ would be a significant shift from Tribes: Vengeance, which felt like playing in a fishbowl. Talk about distilling all the wrong lessons from previous Tribes games.

Aw, sorry about that, LMN8R. For the record I was also very encouraged by your post.

Edit: Damn you, Ned. ;)

Edit 2: This is the first time I’ve ever seriously considered opening my wallet for a F2P.

For the record, when actually playing the game the size of the weapons was never an issue at all. The FOV wasn’t constrained so your view was fine. Most of the time, large weapons are a side-effect of a poor FOV from a console port, so that wasn’t the reason why here.

Most of the people I played Tribes 1/2 with used a fairly wide FOV – 110 or 120, enough to give a bit of a fishbowl lens look to things. A lot of them probably turned off the weapon display, come to think of it. I just stuck to a 90 FOV and bumbled about as best I could.

It hit when the Quakeworld and Quake 2 scenes were at their height. Can’t vouch for the Q2ers but us QW types were used to high FOVs (mine was one of the lower ones at 110) so it just seemed natural to do the same.

Tribes remains the only game that made me consider switching away from QW.