Full disclosure, I played Tribes 2 when it was new, and I also have a close friend working on Tribes 3.
Tribes 3 is on a very different engine than 2 with totally different standards than games had then. Also, who even wants 64 players games? Maybe if we had the large maps of 2 with vehicles and stuff, but the game as it is now isn't focused on that. Maybe it'll get there eventually, but the current goal is not a Battlefield like game. It's a competitive CTF focused game.
64 player matches are great if you want to feel like you don't really matter, but fewer players are better for single person contributions. It's why CS is 5v5 and is so good. A single person actually matters. I agree chaos can be fun, and that my come in time. UE5 is pretty new though and it's all being worked on.
This is a pretty bad take and I feel like you must have not really played tribes very much. Comparing tribes to CS? Really? You think the popularity is because of the team sizes?
The fact that they are only implementing 16v16 seems like a warning flag to me. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up as a mediocre experience with a few tribes mechanics just largely trying to cash in on name recognition.
Missing vehicle combat is one of the two points I listed, so "it doesn't need to be that big because there are no vehicles" is a bad reason.
I don't want to imply that the game called "Tribes 3" will be bad. I just think it should not be called "Tribes 3" when it is not an evolution of Tribes 2 but "only" a small subset with a different focus. "Epic scale" was one of the key elements of Tribes 1 and 2.
The numbers this game pulled during the nextfest have me on edge... it often took me 5 minutes to find a match even when there was just one playable mode and, I assume, no skill-based matchmaking.
It's gonna release for 20 USD, which I much prefer to the free to play model but at the same time I'm really not sure the game can launch into a stable population without that influx of free players