No major updates for Tribes Ascend in the next six months
Tribes: Ascend 2 more likely, says Hi-Rez boss.
There are no major updates planned for free-to-play shooter Tribes Ascend in the next six months, developer Hi-Rez Studios has confirmed.
Instead, the studio will focus on development of its MOBA, Smite.
And even after six months, it seems likely Hi-Rez will turn its attention to other projects. Boss Todd Harris wrote on the studio's forum that after Smite is done and dusted, there are other games to consider.
"For the next six months our primary development focus is Smite," Harris said.
"Beyond that it is GA2 [Global Agenda 2]. And beyond that a TA2 [Tribes Ascend 2] would be more likely than a major update to TA; but to be clear no devs are currently working toward TA2."
Harris was responding to a Tribes Ascend player who took to Reddit to complain about the lack of updates to the game in recent months.
"Basically, the last patch for Tribes: Ascend was on the 12th of March, almost four months ago. Since then, all we've heard about further development on Tribes is a handful of screenshots about Kate's CTF and Arena maps," read the question.
"Anyone in the community could tell you that based on what we've seen, Hi-Rez has effectively stopped most development on the game. And yet we still have no official reason for this, or even confirmation that this is the case."
Harris continued his response: "Per the development blog on our forums, the recent TA work has been Kate developing some additional maps. If time allows then these new TA maps (along with some bug-fixes) would be finalised and deployed but no committed date yet.
"We continue to support TA servers, online community events, tournaments with prizing, bringing Tribes to offline events like recent RTX and upcoming QuakeCon, and live-streaming."
Tribes Ascend was released in April 2012 and sped to over one million downloads within a month of launch.
Writing for Eurogamer, Rich Stanton described Ascend as "a game designed to create a specific kind of fast-paced CTF match, and it does so with aplomb".
Smite is a free-to-play MOBA game inspired by Defence of the Ancients.