A gameplay trailer for the long-awaited return to the Tribes series was released this week, and thousands of dudes with receding hairlines and lower back pain rejoiced. Tribes 3: Rivals, developed by a splinter studio formerly under Hi-Rez, looks like it has all of the fast-paced, momentum-focused gameplay that fans love about the series. It’s too bad that those fans are going to get utterly destroyed in the new one, because they’re all so old now.

Tribes is a long and complicated series of five games from five different studios that’s a spin-off of Dynamix’s ‘90s Earthsiege/Metaltech series of mech games. The old Tribes games have fans, but the series really took off in 2012, when Hi-Rez bought the IP and released Tribes: Ascend.

Boomer Shooter is a genre of retro-inspired games based on classic FPS and arena shooters like Doom and Quake. Tribes: Ascend can be seen as the last modern Boomer Shooter, created before the genre became entirely self-referential and purely nostalgic. Ascend is a high-speed, team-based, tactical shooter known for its incredibly high skill ceiling. You “ski” across giant, hilly maps, using your momentum and changes in elevation to slide down hill and launch yourself into the air towards objectives, propelled by jetpacks. Weapons are almost exclusively projectile based, meaning you have to learn how to lead targets that are screaming through the sky and raining plasma down on the battlefield. It’s as much fun to watch as it is to play, and people got really good at it. Those people are not going to be as good at Tribes 3.

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Movement-focused shooters have evolved since the days of Tribes: Ascend. The Titanfall games, and later Apex Legends, took a lot of Tribes’ principles and raised the skill ceiling even higher. Even Call of Duty has become significantly more movement-focused over the last decade, and the shooter kids today are not like the shooter kids of 2012.

Growing up with zero ping and a 240hz refresh rate has created a generation of gaming warlords that are going to make minced meat of us old dogs on the Tribes 3 battlefield. Have you seen the way they play XDefiant? Those clips scare me, and they’re not even soaring through the sky with a fusion mortar. I can’t even imagine what those Fortnite kids who can build the Sistine Chapel in 2.5 seconds are going to do to us.

The developers of Tribes 3, Prophecy Games, released an extraction shooter in early access in July called Starsiege: Deadzone which has fewer than ten active players currently.

It’ll be 12 years since the release of Ascend when Rivals comes out, and OG fans just won’t be able to keep up. That’s not just my opinion either. I’ve talked to the folks at Aimlabs about aging and reaction time, and while they say their tool can definitely help anyone sharpen their skills, everyone starts slowing down starting in their early 20s. You can still have fun playing movement shooters as an old gamer of course, as long as you can accept that you're at a disadvantage that there’s no compensating for.

Maybe the kids will just let us have this one. There’s a chance something like XDefiant or one of the many extraction shooters coming next year will distract them from an old franchise like Tribes, and let us reclaim our glory days for a while. Realistically though, you’re going to get Thumpered in the face.

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