Tribes Ascend, a 2012 game which in 2015 made a surprising comeback from the dead, is now dead once more, with developers Hi-Rez today issuing the game’s final patch to a community that’s understandably upset, if also accepting of the game’s fate.
There’s a sad poetry to the fact I wrote about the game’s update in 2015 and headlined the article “Not All Multiplayer Shooters Are Abandoned After 12 Months”. And here we are, twelve months later, and the game is being abandoned. Welp.
The final patch is called “parting gifts”, and while it makes a lot of changes and fixes to a game whose servers are still up and running, it also appears to have been too little too late, with the Tribes community—or what’s left of it, the game having languished with little attention or interest for a while now—already talking about saying goodbye to the game, and what their hopes and options are for the future.
Maybe fans will take over running the servers. Maybe a new studio will make a game just like Tribes (like Archetype are doing with Midair). Who knows, maybe a new company will come along, pick up the rights to the Tribes series and pay a little more attention to it than Hi-Rez ever did.