Tribes: Ascend descends after flying high for about a year

The news that Tribes: Ascend would get no substantial updates for the next six months, while Hi-Rez Studios moved on to support development of other projects, came as something of a shock to fans of the free-to-play game on the official forums. Even more upsetting was the fact that there was a good possibility that the dev team was just going to move on to a sequel instead of returning to Tribes: Ascend.

For the next six months our primary development focus is SMITE. Beyond that it is GA2. And beyond that a TA2 would be more likely than a major update to TA; but to be clear no devs are currently working toward TA2.

Hi-Rez COO Todd Harris responded to the outcry a week later with the news that the studio was working on a way for players to edit and submit user-made maps. He stressed that game was far from dead and that support would not end just because no large content patches were planned.

Rock Paper Shotgun interviewed Harris about the state of the game since it’s official launch in April 2012, and why they’re moving on to the sequel already.

The days of major changes in the game are behind us.

We want users to be able to add content, and if there was anything really significant that was to change, that would be in a different title. We won’t be changing the rules on all these people, changing what they’re used to. But again, our priorities right now are, for Ascend we want to give people the chance to make content. Other than that, our studio is focused on Smite, because it’s growing much faster than any game that we’ve dealt with. At the highest level that’s what we’re focused on. That was the intent of the statement. First, to let people know we weren’t going to be doing any other major updates, and then, just today, in talking with the community, to let them know our intent around support for user-generated content.

You can junmp into Tribes: Ascend now for free if you’d like to experience the waning days of an online shooter.