Back in August, Hi-Rez surprised disgruntled Tribes: Ascend fans by announcing that it would be resuming updates after years of maintenance mode. At the time, CEO Erez Goren explained, “With the success of SMITE and Paladins, we have more resources than ever in the studio. We can now afford to go back and improve older games.”
The first large-scale patch for the revived shooter arrives tonight, and it’s a doozy: Just check out the patch notes. Among the core changes, players will find that classes have been heavily reworked into just three armor-based archetypes. There are several new capture-the-flag maps too, along with gear and vehicle tweaks.
So what’s next for the game? That’ll depend on how well fans take to the updates. As Hi-Rez President Stewart Chisam put it over the summer,
“Obviously, we can’t promise how long we will maintain the game — and given our history, I want to be very careful about oversetting expectations. If people don’t like and respond to the changes as we make them, obviously, we will have to stop maintaining the game at some point. But I am hopeful we can get the game to a better spot that our hardcore Tribes community will really love and appreciate for a long time.”
