Hi-Rez hasn’t announced a release date for the Tribes: Ascend reboot, but its public test servers are constantly being updated. The series is renowned for its incredibly fast movement speed, projectile-based combat, high execution barriers, and in the case of Ascend, its gratuitous voice command spam. Hi-Rez Studios acquired the IP from InstantAction in 2010 and released Ascend in 2012. Earthsiege eventually begat Starsiege: Tribes, with the owners of the franchise changing hands several times throughout the past decade. Tribes: Ascend is the latest in a very long series of sci-fi first-person shooters that began with 1994’s Metaltech: Earthsiege, in itself a spinoff of Dynamix’s other series, Metaltech. The rest of the patch notes can be found here.

But their fears were addressed in a statement released in September by Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam, who said that “None of felt good about the state was left in.” The Out of the Blue update aims to rebalance the game and streamline its character customization by condensing its previous nine character classes into three (Light, Medium, and Heavy), and by removing the experience point gates and paywalls that restricted character unlocks. Many fans of the game had felt that Hi-Rez had abandoned the series for good when they announced in 2013 that they would no longer be updating Ascend in favor of working on SMITE. The Out of the Blue update is the first update Ascend has seen for two years, with the previous patch dating to March 2013. The Tribes smorgasbord seems be intended to generate hype for Ascend’s aptly-named “Out of the Blue” update, which was suddenly announced earlier this September.

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