Tribes 3 Alpha Thoughts & Unedited Gameplay (Dec 7-9, 2023 Playtest)
My initial thoughts, first (almost) couple of games, and final thoughts on this iteration of Tribes 3.
Yes my mic is super quiet because I don't test things before executing, but the only time I'm saying anything of importance is at the beginning and end, where the game sound isn't covering my voice (mostly). Plus there's a summary below.
0:00 Initial Thoughts
6:55 Gameplay Begins! Light Armor
24:40 Map 2: Medium Armor
34:00 Swap to Heavy
41:50 Map 3: Sand Map
57:50 Map 4: Embarrassing Sniping Attempt
1:02:52 Aaand... Back to Heavy
1:14:45 Common Easy Anti-Cheat L
1:18:15 Map 5
1:32:25 Closing Thoughts
To summarize the major points, as well as some additional things that I thought of after recording the video as I continued to play the game:
More energy. Double the energy of lights. 1.5x for mediums. Then add a perk to give another 20% energy or something.
Reduce mid-air maneuverability; make it something you need to spend that extra energy on. Perhaps even eliminate mid-air WASD entirely if you aren't actively jetting.
Add more verticality to maps to take advantage of the additional jets.
Increase gravity slightly to reduce the "floaty" feeling.
Delete reloading. It's a pointless mechanic in a game like this and nothing but an annoyance.
Ensure that when jetting out of a slide-ski, you get similar "jump-start" as when you jet while standing, to make up for the lack of jump-skiing.
Get rid of the multiple different versions of the same weapon.
Get rid of heavy armors doing more damage with the same weapons.
Rethink the mechanic of the health pack people drop on death. It's nice in theory but extremely overpowered at the moment. I could stay alive almost indefinitely at the enemy base just massacring new players over and over and healing to full after each one (not in this video unfortunately), and I'm not even that good at combat yet. Even if a better player attacked me, I could just kill one of the less good players and get a free heal mid-fight.
Speaking of broken mechanics, the Impact Nitron needs a rework as well, as it's entirely game-breaking as it is. An effortless way to return any flag and stop any cap, and the only counter-play is killing every single player using it at the same time before trying to cap. And then not allowing any enemy to get anywhere near you during a standoff. At the VERY least, it needs to explode on a timer, not on impact.
I didn't see this exploited myself, but friends told me about it: the Portal Pack shouldn't allow flags to be taken through it. Just like with the Nitron, it's a potentially game-breaking tactic if people start abusing it.
Heavy armor is so objectively the best armor in the game right now that I can't believe the devs even attempted to balance the armors in this version of the game. Most health, most damage, best weapon choices, most maneuverability AND speed (because of the better access to disc jumping and additional speed from the weight of skiing on a downward slope [I think]). So hopefully in the next playtest we see some more balance.
Overall this is a good alpha. Most of the problems are easily fixable. If the devs want this to be a good TRIBES game, they are almost there. But they could also easily kill it and turn it into a pile of garbage like Ascend if they make the wrong choices.
