What is Tribes: Ascend

On the first comment on my last post, the person said they'd never heard of Tribes: Ascend, so I thought I'd make a quick intro post just to explain the game.

Tribes: Ascend is a free to play first person shooter developed by Hi-Rez Studios to continue the legacy of the Tribes games: Starsiege: Tribes, Tribes 2, and Tribes: Vengeance.  So what makes this game different from other FPS's you might ask?  Two main factors differentiate Tribes from other games: movement and shooting.

Unlike most popular FPS's like Call of Duty or Battlefield where walking is your main transportation mode, Tribes utilizes a combination of  "skiing" and the use of a jet pack to move around the maps.  By holding the space bar in Tribes, you begin to "ski," meaning that your character becomes frictionless, allowing you to slide down slopes to gain speed and slide across flat ground.  By jet packing up slopes and skiing down them, players pick up enormous amounts of speed, where even flying across the map at 150km/hr is considered slow.

The other aspect of Tribes that makes it so different is its use of projectile weaponry over hit scan.  In many games, if you hold your cross hairs over a target and click, you get a hit.  This is hit scan, there's no projectile involved, it's just a hit if your cross hair is over them.  While Tribes maintains some hit scan weapons like the sniper rifle and shotguns, most weapons shoot projectiles that have to actually travel to their destination.  Because projectile weapons inherit some of your momentum, aiming while moving suddenly becomes much more difficult.  When chasing an enemy flag carrier while both of you are moving over 200km/hr, taking a shot that hopes to hit involves factoring in your speed, your direction, their speed, their direction, the speed of the projectile you're firing, whether or not the weapon has fall off or fires in a straight line, etc.  All of these factors make Tribes a much more skill based shooter than other games, and pure awesome when you land a crazy shot.

That's enough typing for now, but I'll probably continue this weekend with posts about the different game modes and classes so stay tuned for that.  If you're interested in playing the game, it is free to play with microtransactions to speed up the unlocks of new items so feel free to give it a shot.  Sign up at https://account.hirezstudios.com/tribesascend/?referral=1557216 if you want to use my referral code, or just drop the referral part if you don't.  In game name Ballis for anyone who already plays and wants to hop into a match with me.