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I was thinking about Tribes last night. They made some gameplay changes that I'm not sure I like.
So check it out:
-You no longer spawn as a generic, light armor, shitty guy. You know how you got to completely customize your loadout (Armor, guns, backpack, grenades, etc.)? It is now BF2 style 'you pick a predefined class and go with it.' In the demo there were 9 classes and 'locked' slots for about 15 more. However, you spawn as your class meaning you no longer have to go to an inventory station to receive your gear.
-Health now auto regens. Im not sure if this is class to class or if it works for everyone but its like Halo and Gears of War. If you take damage then you can wait 15 seconds and your health will automatically start going back up. Again, less incentive to go to inventory stations. On the plus side it encourages people to 'rocket jump' using guns like the spinfusor, grenade launcher and mines. Since momentum is a big part of the physics you can really get a speed boost if you pull it off correctly.
-So now that there is no reason to go to the inventory stations there is much less incentive to attack the other team's generators. Sure the turrents are all powered by the gens and (unconfirmed) I heard that even personal, deployable turrets are powered by the gens but if you're fast you can get around the turrets and if you're well armed you can blow them up. Attacking and then camping the gens was one of the best parts of old Tribes games. As a result I saw like one inventory station on the entire map.
-You get some sort of money for doing well and that lets you buy stuff in game like vehicles. You can no longer just go to the vehicle station and call down a Shrike. You have to have xxxx number of credits. I didnt bother to use vehicles because it was a small map but there were people complaining about the vehicles being blocked by this feature. No idea what else you can use the credits on.
-One cool thing, there were parts of the map where you were in some kind of power field that gave you unlimited energy. It meant you could hover and fly around forever. This created a vertical column of guys who were fighting on the X, Y plane instead of the normal X, Z plane. If they do it right they can make some kickass maps using this.
Ouch. I don't mind the cash for vehicles thing...i can deal with "you must do half-way decent to be given the privalge of buying new vech's", but the rest of it kind ruins it for me. I loved the inventory station stuff, building your own kits, and yeah, the generator/base maintenance stuff was half the challenge of the game. I now remain very wary of this one.