Anyone old enough to remember the DISASTROUS launch of Tribes 2?

[DeadSlash]

Tribes 2 should have been the successor to Quake, it had all the momentum and it was pretty hyped by word of mouth in a time before social media. Tribes was amazing and Tribes 2 was going to dominate....

And then the launch happened!

It was one of the worst launches of all time.
I remember reading that there were a lot of server issues, but unfortunately, I couldn't see them for myself because they game didn't work out of the box for a giant chunk of the community. I had an AMD chip at the time and it didn't wok with them for like a week.

This was a time before day 1 patches were a thing, and people were still on dialup.

I was looking for articles about the launch from 2001 but it's difficult to find them. IGN's article from 2001 kind of sugar coats it saying they will hold off on the review until the server stability is fixed and servers got "a lot more crowded" a back handed way of saying people couldn't get ON the servers.

Anyone old hats remember the launch? What do you remember?

[Sten]

I remember the launch. Returned the game to my local game store the day after i bought it. The reason? There was no skiing at launch.

[DustyMachine]

Ski or bunny hops I remember being added in.. don't remember how long it took.

[DustyMachine]

https://youtu.be/nXSxuB16AIk?si=Fuau1tAdMD6xIo5F

[Comrade Shaman]

SHAZBOT! that brings back memories.

[Amazingly Randy]

The game itself worked fine on launch, built in-mirc\with the ability to join a game and leave a link to the game\server you were joining in mirc, functional server list\browser. The stuff that took time to come online were the player profile page, team\clan page\clan tags. This is what I remember anyways.

Now look at us, sitting in Queue. Geez....... WTH happened?

[DeadSlash]

Originally posted by Amazingly Randy:

The game itself worked fine on launch, built in-mirc\with the ability to join a game and leave a link to the game\server you were joining in mirc, functional server list\browser. The stuff that took time to come online were the player profile page, team\clan page\clan tags. This is what I remember anyways.

Now look at us, sitting in Queue. Geez....... WTH happened?

You saying 2 worked out of the box? It definitely didn't. Even the IGN article alludes to it. If you had 0 problems you were in that small minority that hit the hardware lottery.

It's well established record that Tribes 2 had massive technical issues at it's release.

[CAN'T_SKI_SHIT_CAP'N]

Unhandled exception: c000005
At address: 005c88b5


Was also a relatively big resource hog given the average specs at release time. Like, game at "minimum" specs was essentially unplayable, and just kinda OK at "recommended".

You could really see that they were forced to relase like 3-6 months too early by Vivendi/Sierra, the final polish and optimisation was definitively lacking :(

Also, game ran way worse on ATI cards than Nvidia. Like my older generation Geforce perfromed the same or better than the next gen ATI card I got after it. Then again, ATI was never a good choice for OpenGL.

[Amazingly Randy]

Originally posted by CAN'T_SKI_SHIT_CAP'N:

Unhandled exception: c000005
At address: 005c88b5


Was also a relatively big resource hog given the average specs at release time. Like, game at "minimum" specs was essentially unplayable, and just kinda OK at "recommended".

You could really see that they were forced to relase like 3-6 months too early by Vivendi/Sierra, the final polish and optimisation was definitively lacking :(

Also, game ran way worse on ATI cards than Nvidia. Like my older generation Geforce perfromed the same or better than the next gen ATI card I got after it. Then again, ATI was never a good choice for OpenGL.

Voodoo boards. RIP 3dfx.

[DeadSlash]

Originally posted by Amazingly Randy:

Originally posted by CAN'T_SKI_SHIT_CAP'N:

Unhandled exception: c000005
At address: 005c88b5


Was also a relatively big resource hog given the average specs at release time. Like, game at "minimum" specs was essentially unplayable, and just kinda OK at "recommended".

You could really see that they were forced to relase like 3-6 months too early by Vivendi/Sierra, the final polish and optimisation was definitively lacking :(

Also, game ran way worse on ATI cards than Nvidia. Like my older generation Geforce perfromed the same or better than the next gen ATI card I got after it. Then again, ATI was never a good choice for OpenGL.

Voodoo boards. RIP 3dfx.

My first ever card was a "Monster Voodoo2" I believe my last Voodoo was the "Voodoo4" although it might have been the 3.

At some point I owned the original Geforce, that locked up on me incessantly.
Memories. I got the Voodoo 2 for Christmas, I'll never forget shooting rockets down a hall in Quake2 (That I'd played in software mode for like a YEAR!) and marveling at the lighting with my Father.

Originally posted by CAN'T_SKI_SHIT_CAP'N:

Unhandled exception: c000005
At address: 005c88b5


Was also a relatively big resource hog given the average specs at release time. Like, game at "minimum" specs was essentially unplayable, and just kinda OK at "recommended".

You could really see that they were forced to relase like 3-6 months too early by Vivendi/Sierra, the final polish and optimisation was definitively lacking :(

Also, game ran way worse on ATI cards than Nvidia. Like my older generation Geforce perfromed the same or better than the next gen ATI card I got after it. Then again, ATI was never a good choice for OpenGL.

Somewhere floating around out there is a quote from the dev's that's both apologetic and frustrated about how they can now see why Devs go to Xbox because there were limitless hardware combinations to test on PC and it was basically an impossible task.

[DeadSlash]

People today may not realize how uncommon it was for a game to come out in that condition. We had the internet but it wasn't like it is today. People were on dial-up and it was not standard for a "day 1 patch" to be required to make a game work right.

It was at least a week before the patch was posted, I think it was closer to 2. This was back when you still got patches from the DLC. Literally the first patch a game would see was on the disc of it's first DLC. This came at the very end of that era.

[Dr. Loan Lee]

Tribes 2. Miss it so much. Was hyped for Ascend but wasnt all that great

[Drifter]

Inferno vs Storm, yeah I member...

[Capadonna]

Yup I remember, unhandled exception error was the killer. But eventually they got it right and it was an awesome game. I played the Renegades Mod :cool

[Orlyy]

I remember having a lot of fun, though I was not there at launch. My favorite though was the football mod on starsiege tribes :(