If they released one NOW they’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot. At best they’d get mid-generational performance improvements whereas likely in the next year or two Valve is probably going to drop a true SteamDeck 2 with significant improvements. All speculation at this point, but if you’re a bean counter at Microsoft, speculation is like 90% of your job. Unless they abandon the standard console release cycle and shoot for faster iteration, they’ll want to come out absolutely swinging to compete.
Tribes 3 was missing all the secondary objectives stuff that made T2 so much more accessible. Even if you weren’t snapping crazy midair shots or cruising through fast flag caps you could still contribute via base attack or defense, vehicle support, etc. It felt like a crazy mix of arena shooter and early Battlefield games.
They actually had a neat solution to that in the form of some basic bots to help fill in for under-queued matches. Not too different from what Splitgate had going on (man, I miss that one too!) It gave beginners something to chew on a little bit. Would have been nice to have custom server options to tune bots and matches, like in Tribes 2. Apparently that kind of thing is simply too much to ask for.
To say that EVERYONE saw this coming may be an understatement. The moment the devs teased taking out the Honorball game mode and spinning it off into a completely separate game, the writing was on the wall. Possibly my favorite shooter series and it seems to be stuck in development purgatory. Even the unofficial Tribes-likes and other FPS-Z games can’t ever seem to find their footing.
Sure, but we’re talking about a handheld. Yes, performance is improving generation over generation, but in the handheld space power usage and heat dissipation are equally important. If you’ve been keeping up with recent innovations, you’ll see that generally we are making more powerful parts, but they’re getting much more power hungry for every little percent of improvement they bring in raw horsepower. So far it doesn’t look like you could even get Xbox series S performance in a handheld yet. At least not at a reasonably portable size, cost, or battery life. You could get a little better than PS4 pro performance in a handheld at present, based on what I’ve seen. Which is not a full generational leap over what’s out there.