The following are drafts I never got around to finishing/publishing, along with some new stuff.
It's no surprise to anyone who has read this blog that I like Tribes. I've been playing the game on and off since 98, more-so over the past 5-6 years. The main reason I've been playing for so long, besides the overall fun and addiction to the game, is that throughout my life I've never really had a gaming PC. I stuck with a beast of machine for far longer than I should have, with hardware that made pretty much everyone laugh when I gave them the specs. This held me back from being a modern day PC gamer, and meant Tribes and any other game made pre-2003 were the only ones I could play. I was mainly a console gamer until 2006'sh, when the Xbox stopped being relevant and decided to skip on the current generation of consoles. I was in a grey area left playing games from the past. While frustrating at times, I enjoyed what I had.
Games like The Sims, Freelancer, Day of Defeat and Tribes have such an immense amount of replayability that it wasn't a huge issue that I couldn't play modern games. Sure, I would've loved to try out games like Crysis and Bad Company 2, but I didn't make a fuss out of it. I stuck with the games I had and played them to death. So after receiving this laptop in September of 2010, I started looking more closely at modern games such as Mass Effect, Bad Company 2 and even Half-Life 2. But then I started noticing something that quite honestly has me scared a bit. Over the past few months I've seen posts on Reddit from people in similar situations asking a question that I find hard to comprehend: "Does Bad Company 2 still have players?"
The game came out in March of 2010, and people are asking if it still has players? Do today's games, even ones as popular as BC2, have such a short life-span that people are asking these kinds a questions just a year after release? After playing the same game for over a decade I guess I've been spoiled by such a dedicated community, and just assumed all big-name multiplayer games have decent-sized communities that last for at least 5-10 years. While I have no doubt BC2 has a good number of players, it just feels really odd to read a question like that, and I'm seeing it more and more these days. I had the same reaction shortly after the first Section 8 game came out, and someone reported it only had 15 players on at one point. Even Prejudice has low numbers apparently, and that received generally favorable reviews. Anyways, onto my next topic.
Enter bizzaro land: I'm sick of free stuff. I want to pay money for games again. At least, that's my general attitude towards free-to-play games, which is seemingly the 'in' thing to do nowadays when your company fails harder than InstantAction at trying to make a profit. The main reason I'm sick of F2P games is because they're full of shit. And lies. While they may be free to play, they aren't free to enjoy for any decent amount of time. Every F2P game has that sweet spot the developers put in place to stop you from enjoying the game, and requires some sort of financial investment. This is why I have zero interest in Hi-Rez's SMITE, and a dwindling interest in Firefall and whatever the hell Valve is up to(likely Dota 2, which I wasn't interested in to begin with). The same goes for Battlefield P4F, Global Agenda, Champions Online and the most recent F2p game City of Heroes. They all eventually turn into subscriptions which I absolutely refuse to pay. Make a game, require a one time $30-$60 fee, and I'll be happy. I weep for a future void of F2P games, and hope this is merely a passing trend that'll pop within the next 5 or so years. Next topic: Legions.
I'm so confused with Legions at this point. At times I love it, other times I hate it. Right now I'm faced with some pretty crazy realizations about the game and where I thought I wanted it to go. For quite a while now it's been apparent that Legions will take on more Tribes-like gameplay elements such as inventory stations and base assets. Normally I'd be more than happy with such a change, and would welcome it in a heartbeat. I've defended their decision to do so several times on the forum without actually experiencing said changes. However, after a recent 'change' in gameplay I'm starting to doubt my original thoughts.
The developers recently implemented an inventory-like system, and it certainly raised a few eyebrows. In short: you spawned in a default loadout and could only change classes at ammo stations, opposed to whenever the hell you wanted via respawning. It's a feature I just didn't like, mainly because it slowed down gameplay. For someone like me who always plays as the default loadout the developers selected, it didn't affect me one bit. But I still didn't like it because I knew it affected many, if not the majority of others. It took away the one thing from Legions I prefer over Tribes: speed and ease of access. It's so easy to just hop in a game of Legions, pick your class and go. There's no inventory station to deal with, and more importantly there's no wait for the inventory station.
The developers, along with a few players, keep throwing out one very special word: depth. "Legions needs more depth" they keep saying, and claim adding inventory stations, deployables and generators will do just that. Added depth it might provide, but it'll certainly come at a cost, namely speed. Unless of course they have some genius plan to retain the fast-paced nature of Legions, which is mainly due to how damn simple everything currently is. If they could somehow add depth to the game by focusing on making the game even faster, things could get interesting. One proposed idea, which started out as a joke, would be to implement a Quidditch-type game mode. Whether or not it'll actually happen is anyone's guess(mod support would take care of that...), but it certainly makes me chuckle at the thought of it happening.
Thankfully it seems they aren't solely focusing base assets and have recently introduced Rabbit, but again there are problems. In Tribes, there are specific maps with specific spawn points for Rabbit, where as Legions uses existing CTF maps with not-so-friendly spawns. While Tribes has you spawning either in the sky or on a hill so you can gain speed, Legions places you on flat terrain, making it impossible to actually match the Rabbit's speed without rocket/grenade jumping, which of course takes away health. It's yet another balancing issue that plagues Legions, and makes me think if the game can actually become fully balanced. Even the sniper, which launched with the game in 2008, is still getting tweaked to this day.
Well, I think that about sums it up.
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