I can tell you exactly why the weapons are the way they are. The weapons were just awful (what kind of paramilitary force goes into long-range combat with only 1 or 2 actual long-range weapons, and ones that fire slow-moving projectiles at that?), and it was a pain to trudge across the landscape if you didn't have a vehicle. Sierra pushing it out the door unfinished was a big part of why it was what it was, but I think the producer's creative direction accounts for just as much if not more. He also had the coders spend way too much time on the useless community features (which were eventually nixed) and not enough time on bug fixing (in fact, during beta he actually told the testers to not report any more bugs.) Yeah, all of the Quakes have had water, so why not just scrap the whole deathmatch aspect and make it a fishing game instead?' Some of what he did would be akin to Carmack saying 'you know, I think Q4 should be a fishing game. Why would you change fundimental aspects of something in a sequal? People buy a sequal because they liked the original. He would have things changed (much to the outcry of the dev team - I've heard rumors of people being fired on the spot for openly arguing against Sierra/Georgeson's new direction for the game) that shouldn't be changed simply because he didn't like them.

What's more is that he didn't seem interested in paying any attention to what made Tribes Tribes. A lot of the creative decsions about T2 were made by him, a guy that had nothing to do with the Tribes franchise. However, the guy was a complete outsider. Now, I have nothing against the guy personally and I found him to be a rather nice guy when I spoke to him. Yes, they made a lot of unreasonable demands of the dev team (which caused many of them to quit right off the back when they saw their baby heading for the toilet,) but I think the biggest factor in its suckiness was Dave Georgeson.

I don't think the blame can be solely placed upon Sierra. Any lack of quality in the game is due to Sierra's corporate profit-mongering. Sierra forced Dynamix to release Tribes 2 almost a year early.

Tribes 2 buy guns