The difference is that it’s been a long time since OG Tribes. In this kind of situation, in a new game, you’ll have a sizable number of people jumping in with many years of experience. The typical ‘experienced player’ will be a lot more experienced now compared to back then.

You see this in games all the time. I got into masters league in Starcraft 2 in its first expansion after masters became a thing. I’m a MASSIVELY better player now – seriously, it’s embarassing watching old VOD’s of me now – but it’s actually much harder for me to break into masters. This is because the skill level of experienced players in the game is now much higher 13 years after release, compared to 1 year after.

“Read my books, Morty! Some asshole keeps one starring them on Goodreads and you gotta keep up my average!!”

One fear

Perhaps they should consider making good Sonic games, rather than bad ones.

A freshman team made up of fan game devs should not be drastically outperforming Sonic’s own internal studios in making an Actually Good Sonic Game.

Imagine if Mario fan games were clearly superior to Wonder or Odyssey, it would mean Nintendo was a fucking joke. That’s where Sega is, and has been for a long time.

Playing Devil’s Advocate for a moment, I’m not sure how practical the huge server matches are for a very high skill ceiling game like this when it comes to getting new players. Huge player counts in a game makes it impractical to do skill-based matchmaking, and without SBMM, people who’ve been playing Tribes for literal decades will just massacre new players, who will then promptly leave.

You could probably still get a certain amount of hardcore Tribes players that way, so having it as an option for community servers is fine, but I dunno if that would work for the mass market at all.

Super Mario Bros 2 is the most coherent 2D Mario by far imo in terms of it feeling like you’re exploring an actual world rather than a bunch of blocks that a developer put there.

You could have optional quests that actually make the game even harder, but with the benefit of a better ‘side ending’ for some quest line.

Or thinking bigger: you only have so much time to save the world, if you spend more time saving more towns then the bad guy keeps powering up and it’s harder to beat him…but that still means you saved more towns. Sort of the reverse of Breath of the Wild.

Yeah I’m not really into the TA subgenre but 100% agreed.

I’m seeing the usual bad takes about the RTS genre here that I feel should be addressed:

It’s disappointing when you see someone really trying something new in a struggling genre just to see people shit on it for not being the same.

An RTS game being more simplified compared to ‘the classics’ isn’t a new thing. Most RTSes developed over the last 15+ years have bragged about being simpler in some way than Starcraft/Age of Empires, and so far they’ve all been less popular than Starcraft or Age of Empires. Some have still been decently popular, like the Dawn of War/Company of Heroes line, but even those haven’t been more popular.

Two of the four most popular RTSes right now are more than twenty years old, which is really damning.

RTS has been a dying/dead genre for years. You’d think the APM-spam vets would recognize their genre need to change to attract more people.

The “APM spam” games are literally the most popular, and it’s not like most of the people playing are 300 APM professional Koreans: they’re more popular even among less skilled players. Plenty of people suck shit but still enjoy these games thanks to skill-based matchmaking, or they do skirmishes against the AI, or custom games, or campaigns or what have you.

Now, the RTS genre definitely does have problems and things that can be improved on, but there’s a difference between making a game easier to initially pick up versus making it simplified in general. Making it more simplified in general reduces depth and can make a game flat out less interesting, which is bad, not good.

The right way to go is to make RTSes easier to learn – learning a new way of base building/teching is always a pain in the ass in a new game – without simplifying it as a whole. And also to add new modes that will appeal to more casual players; SC2’s endless co-op mode did extremely well there, and it would’ve done even better if it had been there at the initial launch of the game, rather than added in the second expansion when most casual people had already written it off.

It’s pretty wild seeing PC gamers getting behind the idea of turning their platform into a more exclusive, walled-garden-type console.

Having a single main type for a console experience specifically is not a walled garden.

You’d still be able to run games on any random PC, Valve would just make sure that a single baseline works for more casual folks who don’t want to mess with any of that stuff.

Realistically, a lot of the ‘PC gaming experience’ things don’t make sense for a console-style experience. Nobody wants to be fiddling with their drivers or config files on their TV with a controller.

There’s tons of games that have local four player multiplayer these days.

…it’s just that almost none of them are “big budget” games. Nintendo and indies are basically carrying that type of gaming.

Apple Arcade titles can come to consoles/PC eventually.

Wouldn’t mind seeing the concert, but would hate to see what ticket prices end up being.

They sold out instantly when tickets went up for sale I think.