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Tribes Franchise Acquired by Global Agenda Dev, Returning With 'Tribes Universe'
by Alice O'Connor, Oct 25, 2010 7:50am PDTA new entry in the shooter series 'Tribes' is finally in the works, developed by the franchise's new owner, HiRez Studios--the dev behind shooter MMO Global Agenda.
The new game, titled Tribes Universe, is set to boast a persistent world with territory control and battles featuring over one hundred players, according to a feature rundown in the announcement post written by HiRez co-founder Erez Goren.
- Three Tribes (factions)
- Full clan (agency) support
- First person view (third person for some vehicles)
- Full vehicle support (ground and air)
- Full persistent world with territory control (no instances)
- PvP focused
- Huge outdoor maps (about 10x the area of sonoran desert)
- Large scale fights (100+ players)
- Jetpacks, skiing, lots of weapons, etc
The rights were previously owned by GarageGames, the tech company and developed founder by veterans of the Tribes series' creator Dynamix, who kicked it all off in 1999 with Starsiege: Tribes. The series' hallmarks were large, team-based battles on huge maps, deployable structures, jetpacks and super-fast movement known as "skiing," original born of a physics bug.
Another four Tribes games followed, the last of which was Irrational Games' Tribes: Vengeance in 2004. However, the series did receive a spiritual sequel of sorts in GarageGames' Fallen Empire: Legions for its browser-based browser-based games portal InstantAction, though the service is currently offline. GarageGames announced back in 2009 that the original Tribes would also hit InstantAction though it has yet to materialise and with the rights passed to HiRez, it's not clear whether it ever will.
There's no word yet on Tribes Universe's platforms or release date, though it's due to enter alpha testing in around three months. The pricing model hasn't been revealed either but as persistent worlds aren't free, it wouldn't be surprising if Tribes Universe followed Global Agenda's example and charges for the game and content updates but has no subscription fees.
Comments
This looks worse then another Tribes: Vengeance. Global Agenda itself was a poor knockoff of Tribes, so they went straight for the kill and are just going to produce something with the Tribes name and Tribes items. This really pisses me off.
If they understood anything about the players that love Tribes, they would know they DON'T need a server managed by their company which will nickle and dime us every chance they get in order to have 100+ players. Tribes 2 had 128 player lan support and there were 64 player normal servers all over the place!
This is just wrong in so many ways. Are they going to allow the modability that was capable in Tribes 1 and 2 allowing players to make new content and completely new derivatives of the game? I highly doubt that's even possible in the MMO world unless they do something like Second life.
I will echo everyone elses concern here, we don't want a bastardized MMO designed to prey on our memories of the past glory of Tribes. If it's not going to be Tribes (Vengeance) DON'T MAKE IT AT ALL!
Tribes was and still is the single best FPS I've ever played on the PC and probably will ever play. Even now all the features they put into it are barely being added to new games and their implementation totally sucks. I honestly believe the developers of Tribes put everything they ever wanted to see in a FPS into one game and it was glorious. They wanted to make a great game and not something that would milk it's buyers. They even had free-DLC, which they called patches back then, even after being fired they still delivered to the community.
It's sad that you can tell how these things are going to turn out from a simple game announcement a few years before the game is going to come out. All the companies are the same and I, as well as my friends, played Global Agenda - it blows. Everyone wants to make the next WoW and no one actually cares about what makes a good game anymore.
They aren't even trying to make it a better incarnation of it's former glory. It's just going to have some Tribes-esque things in it that will make us go 'oooh, wow, a spinfuzor... remember when...' and the rest of it will suck. Developers don't seemingly know what gamers want, the only listen to the finance department that makes them stare at the MW2 and WoW piechart and tells them to make something that attracts those players. The only saving grace of that trend lately has been TF2.
Sadly my friends and I have even joked in the past that developers don't play their own games and I think that actually is becoming more and more prevalent. I almost think they aren't even gamers, they just know how to code and they're assigned a job task they do simply to get done with work and leave for the day like the rest of America. Even if the publishers didn't pummel them into submission through overworking and deadlines and they were freely allowed to design something that wasn't all about milking consumers, I highly doubt they're motivated enough to make something as epic as Tribes was. It's almost like they simply don't care anymore.
This all comes after an announcement for Firefall, which looks very promising and is made by a ex-Dynamix developer. They laid the IP to rest for nine years (screw Vengeance) only to have it come back in mockery of it's former glory.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 11 replies.
Bioshock is like every other generic RPGish game that comes out on the console now. It has a few special elements in it and highly linearized gameplay. It also has zero replayability.
Fallout 3 is just Oblivion in the future, they're decent games, but it's easy for it to lose your interest. No multiplayer and no replayability because of it.
Borderlands was fun for a change, but got extremely repetitive and boring. Also another game I would list as having zero replayability, although others would disagree.
L4D didn't deliver on a small fraction of what they planned on it. They turned sprawling zombie city into a narrow corridor shooter with very predictable moments. It wasn't even a fraction of what they could've made it into. It lacked depth, gear, guns, and pretty much any other element to make it interesting.
L4D2 I didn't buy on principle because it's the other half of L4D. They decided to fuck over gamers in order to make more money and basically just released the other half of the game for the full price and completely chopped off support for original owners except for a few publicity stunts. Once again, what I'm talking about milking the consumers.
League of Legends is a rip off of DotA designed to milk consumers with microtransactions and those sort of games suck anyway. The only people that like them are the people that enjoy hours of grinding in MMOs.
UT2K3 wasn't all that great, UT was better and I never really got into it. I've played plenty of twitcher FPS's and it just sucks. I don't know what it is, but neither me or my friends could really get into the style of action that it presented. It offered a great engine for modability, but other then that it blows.
TF2 is the one saving grace as I mentioned before. Offers highly specialized and fun gameplay. The keyword here is fun. UT2K3 overall had more to offer as a game, but it doesn't matter. The company that did TF2 got the formula down and they made something that worked. Not only did they polish their product unstead of releasing copious amounts of paid DLC for their broken game, but they offered ridiculously large content updates without ever charging a cent for it. Just as a good game developer should do and they still make plenty of money off of it.
The list you presented except for the last game are all examples of the crap they've been spewing out in the last few years UT2k3 was released seven years ago so I don't even know what it's doing in that list. They're all mediocre at best designed to just sell to a certain metric in the market instead of being all around good games. The development teams were sat down and presented with their playerbase and they were supposed to design a product around it. It's stupid.
Good examples of games to check into is TF2, Minecraft, Rise of Legends, Dawn of War, and Sins of a Solar Empire. CoD4 was pretty good (not MW2), but that was milked dry and is full of hackers now. Other then that there really aren't any amazing FPS's to come out in quite a long time or MMOs for that matter.
Conan sucked, WAR was released half baked and they lost all their players because of it, APB... well you know, and Aion is the most ridiculous grind fest I've ever played.
Even if the developers are trying, they just want to make something and get their name on it or they're after the pay check. No one sits down now days with a dream or a vision and wants to make something that will shake the world. Even Blizzard finally succumbed to this and no longer makes anything new, they just want to appease the masses and reel in their money.
As far as Global Agenda goes. It's basically Teamfortress 2, only it required a monthly payment and wasn't nearly as fun. They even ripped game modes directly from TF2.
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