The brilliantly weird, and largely unintuitive, Tribes: Ascend has endured a chequered past. It s on-off-on again legacy mirrors that of an afternoon soap opera romance having been brought back from the edge of extinction in late December last year via its first update in two years however its latest update, named Parting Gifts, marks its curtain call.

We caught up with developer Hi-Rez following last year s rejuvenating patch 1.1, where the studio told us its mismanagement of Tribes: Ascend was like death by a thousand cuts . The latest appropriately-named update brings the game to version 1.4 and signals the end of the line.

Full patch notes which include tweaks to gameplay, equipment and vehicles, among other things can be located over here, and a pretty comprehensive weapons statistics spreadsheet can be perused this way.

In conversation with Chris at the start of this year, Tribes creative director Sean McBride who was a member of the original team that pushed for Hi-Rez to acquire the license in the first place spoke of how relaunching in 2015 was more about steadying the ship, not necessarily about turning profit.

We all know that player counts are not going to be super high, he said about the game s diminished community The intention is to at least stretch it out over a longer tail, so, if we do need to leave it, we ll have a planned date, so we can make sure everything s in order. We didn t do that last time. It was like we all need to go onto Smite, right now.

Over on Reddit, it seems the community, what s left of it, is already making peace with the fact Tribes: Ascend is no more. One user, Regginator12 , sums up his or her feeling thusly: This game was so good while it lasted, such a wasted opportunity, I ve never seen such a high speed FPS since with huge maps and no hitscan. RIP.

Following the publication of this story, we changed the original headline, "Tribes: Ascend is no more" to better reflect the fact that Tribes: Ascend is still playable and available. Patch 1.4 is simply the final official update for the game. Ed.

Back in December, the free-to-play FPS Tribes: Ascend was updated for the first time in two years, shortly after which developer Hi-Rez Studios talked to us about how it had screwed up the game, and more importantly, what it was doing to try to bring it back. The December patch was a small step forward for the hardcore guys that stuck around, but Creative Director Sean McBride said that more was on the way. Apparently, he wasn't kidding.

The Tribes: Ascend 1.3 patch adds the new Hellfire map for CTF and Blitz modes, increases the votekick percentage from 35 to 45 percent, changes ammo pickup heals to 400 hp across all armor types, and, by community request, removes the Blueshift map from rotations, although it will still be available to play on custom servers.

Changes have also been made to equipment and vehicles, some of them quite dramatic: All automatic weapons have had RNG-based spread removed in favor of skill-based precision—you hit what you aim at, in other words, and miss what you don't—and Thrown Disk damage has been nearly halved, from 600 points to 350; the direct hit multiplier has been increased, however, from 1.5 to 2. Naturally, the update also includes some bug fixes and network optimizations designed to improve the game's performance.

It's not a huge patch but it's fairly extensive for a four-year-old game. What makes it interesting, though, is the fact that it exists at all. Tribes: Ascend doesn't have the worst Steam player numbers I've ever seen, but it's still in pretty dire shape. It enjoyed a nice bump in December thanks to the release of the patch, but quickly settled back into a sub-150 average player count. (Update: As a couple of folks have pointed out, Tribes: Ascend is available outside of Steam using its own launcher, so that's not the total user count. Even so, I think it's a fair reflection of the game's relatively tiny audience.) Those are numbers a studio might understandably be tempted to walk away from (especially when compared to Hi Rez's other game, Smite, which drew nearly 11,000 average players over the past 30 days), and so the fact that it's hanging in there is actually kind of impressive. I hope it works out.

Things looked so good for Tribes Ascend when it was released in early 2012. Wonderful, breath-clutching games of chicken happen along the z-axis in Tribes: Ascend, wrote Evan Lahti in our review. We loved it. We played it. But it needed love from its developer, too—bug fixes, new maps, tweaks to make it more fun, major changes to the F2P economy. Instead of getting better with patches and updates, Tribes: Ascend got worse. A year later, it was all but abandoned by Hi-Rez Studios, which moved on to its now-successful MOBA Smite. All but a few players were gone, too, and the ones who stayed were angry and bitter.

Now, out of the blue—the apt name for Tribes: Ascend s first patch since 2013—Hi-Rez has returned to the game to fix its many, many missteps. It s a small team, and they don t expect to make money off the game. But they may be able to make things right.

We made a lot of mistakes in a lot of different places, creative director Sean McBride told me on a recent trip to Hi-Rez. Pricing definitely was off. Way too expensive in the beginning. Both for XP, our earned currency in the game, and gold. And money was just one of Tribes: Ascend s problems, which McBride talked candidly about. It was a refreshing conversation—you rarely hear developers so openly talk about everything they did wrong.

It s death by a thousand cuts, right? McBride said. In the early days, Hi-Rez patched Tribes, but the patches were bad. Weapon releases bloated the game. So he s ditching those. Ascend s perk system included some overpowered abilities and some worthless ones. So they re getting rid of it. Everything was too expensive, so they re refunding every player the gold they spent to re-buy weapons and equipment as they please.

We re pulling back on a lot of the patches we did post-launch, he said. They had tons of weapons in them. At the time our numbers always bumped up when we had patches with weapons on them. People come back for new content. But it wasn t quality content at all. We were just scrambling to get content in the game, and we had this tiny team. So we created variants of the weapons, basically. And they were useful variants, it wasn t like they were just junk. But it bloated the game.

"It's death by a thousand cuts, right?"

One example: The Jackal, a triple-round burst sticky grenade launcher. Unlike the rest of Tribes: Ascend s weapons, you could detonate it in the air whenever you wanted. That made it a lot of fun—and completely broken in the hands of better players. It wasn t designed to be pay to win, but it ended up being pay to win. Because people are better at your game than you are.

Surprisingly, even at the height of Tribes: Ascend s development, it was being handled by a very small team. I think at our biggest we were like 15, but it didn t stay at 15 for very long, said McBride. It was a passion project from the beginning. I think there were many weeks where I pulled over 100 hours just to try to get Tribes done. That wasn t just me. That was people I was working with as well.

Hi-Rez was a much greener studio at the time, and in a way the positive reviews and buzz for Tribes proved to be its undoing. We didn t really listen to the community, McBride said. Once the high scores rolled in...PC Gamer gave it Editor s Choice, and we got a couple 10s and a bunch of nines and a few eights. We did pretty well on the scores. I think at the time we were very resistant to changing the game. We were like, people like it, it scored really well. It wasn t until the numbers started to fall that we really would consider even changing it. There was a big resistance to listening to feedback from the community, which wasn t the right call.

Another tactical error: releasing Tribes a mere month before Diablo III. McBride remembers being worried that the older PC playerbase, which had played the original Diablo and Tribes in the late 90s, would leave Ascend for Diablo.

As soon as Diablo came out our numbers tanked and we never recovered from those numbers, he said. That definitely wasn t the reason we didn t take off. We were already starting to dip, but once you lose the players it s hard to get them back.

As Tribes floundered, Hi-Rez moved what remained of its small team to work on Smite. Two years later, Hi-Rez has ballooned from a studio of around 50 to more than 200 on the back of Smite. That s given them the resources to dedicate a small three-person team to Tribes, with programming and art resources occasionally borrowed from other teams, even if the game can t turn a profit. When McBride took charge of Tribes a few months ago, he dug through forums, reddit posts, and old Youtube videos to assemble a massive list of changes the game needed. There was, as he expected, a lot of hate.

But I listened to what the competitive community wanted, and all of it made sense, he said. It was a lot of the things we were already saying internally. Which is usually the case. We see the game first and look at it and are like, these things are screwed up.

Last week, after a few months of experimenting with the community on a public test server, Hi-Rez released the first new patch in two years, and a lot has been changed. The nine classes have been condensed into light, medium and heavy. The loadout system has been revamped and everything has been rebalanced. Perks were removed and distributed among the armor classes. The hitbox toggling cheat was finally addressed. There are three new maps and fewer useless weapons.

The out of the blue patch isn t a funeral dirge for Tribes, either. McBride said another patch will follow. His hope is to see a bump in player numbers, but he doesn t know if they ll stick around. That s partly why we re experimenting with game modes right now, he said. If we bring back the middle core player, the people who really loved the game but didn t stick around for very long, if they come back around and there s nothing really that new, like a new game mode that is a very different experience, they re probably going to drop out again after about a month.

But this patch, at least, is not concerned with players who might come back and dabble. It s for the hardcore guys that stuck around, he said. There was some concern that the hardcore guys were going to want things that made the game a lot harder. A bad experience for new players. I found that to not be the case at all. They actually wanted things that made it a little easier. They weren t asking directly for things to make it easier, but what they were asking for made it a little easier.

Since its patch, Tribes: Ascend hasn t seen a big enough uptick in players to settle into Steam s top 100 most-played games, but it has grown (and not all of its players launch the game through Steam). I myself, am loving the abundance of players...the return of old players, and of course, the acquisition of new ones, wrote one player on the Tribes subreddit. There is no denying that T:A has seen a dramatic surge in popularity since the launch of Out Of the Blue. The new wave of players has undoubtedly brought both optimism and hope to a subreddit that was previously full of wry humor, bitter sarcasm, and dwindling creativity. While I do not expect this second breath to last forever, I do plan on riding this wave as far as it can take us, wrote another.

The community seems energized—and hungry for more updates, which Hi-Rez says are on the way. For now, people are finally playing Tribes again.

At 5pm EST today, Tribes: Ascend will undergo six hours of downtime as its first patch since March 2013 is applied. It's a substantial overhaul of the free-to-play, physics-defying shooter that has been cooking on the public test servers since September, when Hi-Rez Studios announced it was ending Tribes' long abandonment.

The full patch notes can be found here, although there's enough to form a small patch-cyclopaedia. The most susbstantial changes concern classes, maps and the premium currency, Tribes Gold. Three new capture-the-flag maps—Ice Coaster, Perdition and Terminus—join the roster, while the class system has been simplified into light, medium and heavy armour-wearers with full loadout customisation. Weapons themselves have also undergone major rebalancing.

All Tribes Gold and XP used to purchase items at any point in Tribes' lifespan is being refunded. If you've purchased Gold or the Game of the Year edition at any point, you'll automatically be given the Ultimate Weapons Pack—every gun in the game.

Hi Rez president Stewart Chisam told us that the team isn't expecting to make much money from the Tribes revival, and the patch does have the feel of doing right by a stonkingly good shooter as opposed to a savvy business move.

Hi-Rez has made all the Tribes games available for free, as well as the Earthsiege series that predated it. They're all PC titles, with the exception of Tribes: Aerial Assault, which I think might be the first PS2 game released as freeware by its developer. (It comes as an .iso file, so you'll be able to play it in an emulator and on chipped/modded PS2s.)

I'm not sure how active or functional the multiplayer is for the previous Tribeses, but there's some single-player stuff in there, and I'd imagine it would be quite fun to download a few and take a nostalgic jet-pack-powered trip down memory lane. I've not played a Tribes game before, as you may have gathered, but the first-person, mech-based Earthsiege games have caught my eye here.

Here's the full list of newly free stuff (Tribes Ascend, the most recent in the series, was of course already free-to-play):

• Earthsiege
• Earthsiege 2
• Starsiege: Tribes
• Tribes 2
• Tribes: Aerial Assault
• Tribes Vengeance
• Tribes Ascend

It's not clear if this a time-limited offer, or whether these games are free for the forseeable future, so git downloading, if you're interested. (Thanks, Reddit.)

After a period of absence, Hi-Rez is now working on Tribes Ascend again.

Tribes: Ascend is finally being supported again. With absolutely no warning, the aptly named Out of the Blue patch was announced earlier this month. Currently playable on a new public test server, the update is going to revamp the class system, add maps, and make balance tweaks. 

Much of the Tribes fanbase stopped playing a long time ago, feeling that developer Hi-Rez Studios had abandoned the game and its players in favor of supporting Smite, caring little about the state Tribes was left in. Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam told me today at TwitchCon that they've been wanting to come back to Tribes for a long time.

"None of us felt good about the state it was left in," Chisam told me, saying Smite had been consuming most of the studio's attention. Now that Smite has seen a considerable amount of success, they "finally got the chance" to restart work on Tribes, according to Chisam.

Even with the Out of the Blue update, and with more updates on the way, Chisam isn't especially optimistic about Tribes' popularity. "I don't think we'll ever make money off of it," he said, describing it as a "passion project" in comparison to Hi-Rez's other games.

I asked if they planned to continue updating and balancing Tribes: Ascend and Chisam told me "that's certainly the plan," as the game now has a small but dedicated team within Hi-Rez. "[We have] four or five people working on Tribes full time, and I'd love to keep that team around for a while ... It's starting to feel more like the old Tribes games."

Here are the patch notes for the second public test server, and the download instructions.

Tribes: Ascend is still a lot of voice command spamming, people accusing each other of being scrubs for using automatic weapons, and big Reddit debates about balance. Those things won't change, but Tribes is changing—finally. Hi-Rez has barely touched Tribes over the past couple years, and the upcoming patch is called 'Out of the Blue' because no one expected it. I did an actual double take when I saw the announcement, glancing away before realizing what I'd just read. Tribes? Update? What?

The patch isn't implemented yet, but it is available to play on Tribes' new public test server (it's a separate download, so don't go reinstalling Tribes from the main launcher). The community is more energized than it's been in a long time. The debates about which weapons should go and which loadouts are 'honorable' never really went away, but now there's some hope that Hi-Rez is actually going to act on them.

The update on the current test server changes a few things, but it most importantly overhauls the way loadouts are configured. Previously, there were classes like Pathfinder and Juggernaut, each with two weapon slots, a belt item, a pack, and two perks. Now, there are simply light, medium, and heavy builds, each with much more liberal rules, and the number of potential loadout combos is huge. And that's going to break stuff, hence the test server. I'm not sure anyone is fond of my spinfusor, sniper, stealth build.

The UI is still clunky as hell, which Hi-Rez admits, and right now the patch is essentially a reorganization of what was already there. It allows for different combos, but there are still plenty of ideas about what Hi-Rez ought to do—aside from bug fixes, which are a given. Some say chainguns should be nerfed across the board—specifically the hitboxes—or that nearly all damage should be nerfed, or that shotguns were overnerfed (actually it seems everyone agrees on this). Some say that snipers should be required to use an Energy Pack, like in Tribes 2, or that lights should be allowed three weapons. There's talk of removing the Quick Draw perk and giving everyone a faster weapon switch speed, or giving only light armor a faster weapon switch speed. There are a hell of a lot of decisions to make—reams of community feedback to weigh and prioritize—as Tribes finds a route to redemption.

And the surprise patch announcement hasn't earned Hi-Rez instant praise from Tribes players. There's still a lot of anger that it left Tribes behind, and skepticism that anything will really change, or that anything will ever convince players to return. But there's also been a lot of constructive discussion, and creative director Sean McBride, who was previously Ascend's art director, has been talking fairly openly about the state Tribes was left in, and his plans to build it back up again. "We are very excited about bringing Tribes support back, and look forward to hearing what everyone thinks," he wrote in an introduction. "Thanks everyone, I'm sorry it's been so long."

When I joined the PTS last week (the first time I'd played Tribes: Ascend in a long time) I started by skiing around a bit, looking for good routes on the new map. There were only a few other players in the server. One was complaining about his mouse, insisting that he could beat us with a spinfusor—but he was using an auto. Another was just making flag runs and occasionally dueling in the midfield. Someone was destroying our generator. I was spamming [VGW].

It felt like visiting an old apartment—somewhere I lived for a couple years in a transitory stage of life—and noticing the unchanged light fixtures and the chipped bit of the kitchen counter. Even as a cloaking sniper, Tribes: Ascend feels the same. I'm not sure what it has to become to renew my 2012 dedication, but doing something is a start. 

I'd suggest first that Hi-Rez fix the longstanding bugs, as I expect that's the best way to start winning over the players. After that, I hope it performs extreme experiments on the PTS. Mess with the chainguns, give lights a grenade launcher, pare down the weapon selection, take drastic steps to figure out what will make Tribes more fun. For me, the fun is in going fast (of course) and, outside of sniping sometimes, landing difficult shots with slow-moving projectiles. I don't know exactly what changes will encourage that kind of play and make it more fun for me, but as I said, there are a ton of suggestions to test. And McBride has been talking about testing them, saying that nerfs and weapon adjustments are coming in the next public test server. I'll happily be a guinea pig, because it might be a tad optimistic, but I could really go for a Tribes renaissance. 

In July 2013, Hi-Rez co-founder Todd Harris said that the studio was going to take a six-month break from updating free-to-play shooter Tribes: Ascend so that they could focus on Smite. Fast forward more than two years, and the studio has surprised us with patch notes for a new update due this month.

Among other changes, we know from the preliminary patch notes that this upgrade includes a new Capture the Flag map (Terminus), class changes (e.g. that all have been condensed to three choices: Light, Medium, and Heavy), and other tweaks.

Hi-Rez hopes to release Version 1.1 for public testing on or before September 14, so they can gather feedback and fix bugs before doing a proper release. Over at the Tribes sub-reddit, creative director Sean McBride has pointed out that the changes listed so far are "just the early changes and do not represent the entirety of the actual patch".

McBride is new to the creative director role. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was art director at the studio from 2006, until last month, when he got the new job. His job description suggests this new update represents significant reinvestment in the game:

"I oversee development and set the new direction for the Tribes:Ascend revitalization project. I'm passionate about Tribes and with a high level of involvement with the community we intend to move the game in a direction that works for everyone."

Given that Tribes: Ascend was good enough to get an 88 when Evan reviewed it for us, that looks like good news to me.

The MOBA genre already has colossal communities in both League of Legends and Dota 2, but what's missing is an arena where the greatest gods of mythology toss magic fireworks at each other and roast a couple thousand mortal minions. Enter Smite, Hi-Rez Studios' free-to-play god-on-god rumbler, which launches in full today after a lengthy beta period and is available for all to download on its official website.

Smite changes up the player's perspective for its tri-lane skirmishes by dropping the camera behind the shoulders of your chosen god and using WASD for movement, a more action-oriented angle echoing Hi-Rez's FPS roots from Tribes: Ascend. Playable deities come from various pantheons, such as Greece, China, and the Roman Empire. Otherwise, it's typical MOBA fare of farming minions for increasingly powerful abilities and waging a tactical tug-of-war into the enemy base.

Hi-Rez also shared a batch of stat highlights from Smite's beta period. The game had 3 million registered users and over a billion player kills. The Mage class turned out the most popular choice followed by the gank-tastic Assassin class. On the cosmetic side, one of the most popular skins was this little number for Poseidon.

Smite became Hi-Rez's full-time focus after the studio decided to relax further development on Tribes: Ascend last September, with CEO Erez Goren claiming the extra profitability a MOBA provides is what Hi-Rez needs to continue weekly updates and content additions.

Have a look at more Smite info on its official website, or head here to download the client and get playing.