Tribes Vengeance Playable Demo Available

JimLynch writes "There's a playable demo of Tribes Vengeance available (single and multiplayer)." Gamespot recently took another look at the Vengeance Multiplayer experience, and Tycho has thoughts on playing the demo over at Penny Arcade.

Comments

A stroll down tribes lane

[tod_miller]

I loved the opriginal tribes. I never knew what the maps were, I always ended up on some wierd server where you could jump 10 miles high and bullets had the power of s uitcase nuke.

On normal server, the pulsing and fearful gameplay really had you hooked, if you didn't play as part of you team, the other would be able to ply thier way into your base, knocking out power and shields.

The flight mechanics were a little novel, but the terrain system was awesome.

My favourite moment was laser sniping from peak to peak, while a large battle of explosions clouded my view of the opposing snipers!

Did't quite beat a good old game of action quake 2 though...

Funny how games such as Halo have completely been unable to capture 10% of how good these games were.

Gameplay folks, I guess it does exist, it seperates the half lifes from the no lifes :-) [yes I know what a half life is!]

Recent games I played: Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, Postal 2.

Postal 2 is just for kicks. :-)

Re:A stroll down tribes lane

[BrookHarty]

Tribes beauty was how simple and elegant it was. You had skiing and simple easy to understand weapons. Tribes2 had a horrible launch due to the lack of 3dfx support, and numerous bugs (Sierra forced the launch). Now, T2 is a rather good game.

Both Tribes1 and Tribes2 are free now, go download them off Fileplanet.

Tribes Vengeance skiing is weird, you actually just hover, so it¦s a lot of change. Lag is a little worse, and since it uses the Unreal 2004 engine, unreal hacks work on the game. Servers already have speed hackers. Sad really.

Things I don¦t like about TV, no ammo pack, skiing, speed pack hacks, lag issues, no mine-discing, sniper kills on Light is too easy, ammo on sniper rifle, HO¦s are a little too powerful in a base, no beacons, no way pointer.

Things I do like about TV, great gfx (unreal 2004 engine), Models for each class is very highly detailed, weapons are almost true to tribes, new Grappling hook is amazing (Quake CTF anyone?), repair pack is more automated, fast action.

I played Tribes1 way too much, playing in clan¦s and going to Tribescon1, T2 and T3. First place team at T1, 2nd at T2. So I¦m a little picky on what I like about new tribes games.

Single player of TV is rather fun, and MP needs a little tuning. They did a nice job bringing back Tribes.

-IronWolve

Re:A stroll down tribes lane

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

The grappler seems gimmicky and rather pointless, apart from the indoor maps. I get the feeling they made indoor maps just so the grappler would have a purpose to exist.

I agree with you in general though, it's a nice take on the Tribes universe, and I'll be playing this one online a lot.

Re:A stroll down tribes lane

[BrookHarty]

You can really move with a grappler, and you can use them to corner buildings. When you corner a building, everyone else following you goes in a straight line, they cant turn as quick.

Also, I've seen it used to get a flag, defend, lots of uses. Too young in the game to count it out.

I really miss ammo packs, cant be a good mid-HO without one.

Re:A stroll down tribes lane

[Anonymous Coward]

If the other children are using speedhacks, then they aren't really your friends.

Re:A stroll down tribes lane

[ShaggusMacHaggis]

try grappling the ground....then pressing the 'walk backwards' key...then let go of the grappler and press forward at the same time...it gives you a huge boost.

and its great for changing direction mid-route.

Re:A stroll down tribes lane

[tod_miller]

I am going to d/l tribes 2 and patches and try it... I am worried about getting hooked - is there a bot version? That'll give me about 20 minutes of fun, and then I can wean off it gradually :-)

Thanks for the links - will also try TV single player [I have the demo d/l'd]

Same old maps

[HAKdragon]

I played the open multiplayer beta that they recently had and enjoyed it, though I'm not a big fan of the way they've reworked the vehicles spawns.

Anyway, I kind of wish they would have included more or different maps with the demo instead of the four that they had in the beta. While these maps are fun, they do get old pretty quickly.

HUD mods

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

For those of you who don't like the default head's-up display, this is moddable, just like the original Tribes. I came across this HUD, which is a lot more like Tribes 1. (I play using the "high-res" version, even though I'm running at medium resolution, because doing so makes the map extra big.)

Great game, release date is Oct 5th - no linux

[ShaggusMacHaggis]

Can't wait for the full release of the game this week. Hard to believe they started work on it just over 2 years ago.

Having played the closed beta, open beta, and demo extensively, I can really say this is truely a tribes sequel (even though it takes place before t1 and t2). This is probably the most fun i've had playing an online game in quite awhile.

There are still issues though - there are still bugs in the demo, which is the same code as the 'gold' code. When will developers learn that they need to wait to release the product until all known bugs (especially gameplay altering ones) are worked out...if anything, you would have thought they would have learned from the horrible release that tribes 2 had. At least the bugs aren't as bad as the ones tribes 2 had, but still...there is no excuse for this.

Also, it looks like there may not be a linux server (and certainly, no linux port of the game like there was for t2....) I'm not losing any sleep over the no linux client, but I do think it's a shame that there is no linux server. Apparently the problem is they would have to license the havok engine for linux as well - and I guess they didn't want to pony up the money for it...not sure if it would be really worth it in the longrun i guess.

The developers hang out quite a bit over on the Tribalwar forums.

Re:Great game, release date is Oct 5th - no linux

[Marc_Hawke]

Seems funny that there's be no Linux client. Most of the hard work is done for them. (They are using the Unreal Engine, which has Linux support.) No online game has been able to live without a Linux server though, so expect that soon.

Anyway...I don't know...but I definately expected they'd take advantage of the work that's been done.

Re:Great game, release date is Oct 5th - no linux

[G1ZM0]

Saying it's unreal engine is like saying HL is quake engine. While that was the starting point a lot has been changed. Skiing required a complete physics rewrite and much of the network code has changed. I would love to see a Linux port (at least a server) but I'm not holding my breath. Tribes 1 never had any Linux and it did fine. The demo fluctuates between 10-20 on gamespy stats. I'm not worried about not having enough servers. Most games end up with too many servers filled with bots anyway.

Time travel?

[billybob]

Did I get transported to last week when this was news???

Re:Time travel?

[Pizzop]

yeah. or maybe you caught up and read the news that this is the official multiplayer demo, and the one everyone's been playing was the beta. There are a lot of differences, like an actual opening rather than just the sky. there's a lot of tweaks they did, maybe you didn't notice cuz you were to busy dismissing the story before you read it.

Re:Time travel?

[billybob]

yeah. or maybe you caught up and read the news that this is the official multiplayer demo, and the one everyone's been playing was the beta. There are a lot of differences, like an actual opening rather than just the sky. there's a lot of tweaks they did, maybe you didn't notice cuz you were to busy dismissing the story before you read it.

Actually, I stand behind my original post. The official multi player demo was released on September 29, at least that's the date it was released on filerush.com and the date that I grabbed it, which means it may have been officially released even earlier.

This story was posted October 4. That's 5 days later. Hence my last week comment. I was just joking around anyways. It just seems like sometimes slashdot is WAY behind on things. :)

Tribes *

[Anonymous Coward]

OFN, but go pick this game up this week!

XP administrator access

[Lust]

Following up on a spat of /. posts complaining that people should _never_ run XP as Administrator unless performing administerial duties, let me quote the TribesV readme.txt:

* Installing under "Windows XP Limited user account" causes failed installation and non-progression.

* Game cannot be started by user who lacks Administrator access in Windows XP.

I'm not slagging Tribes, but rather emphasizing that running XP without full privs is virtually impossible. How much longer before we can truly separate admin and limited users under XP?

Re:XP administrator access

[EvilAardvark]

I believe you are confusing administrative privileges with the administrator account. Any user account can be given administrative privileges.

Wasn't Too Impressed

[EvilAardvark]

I love the concept of Tribes, and back 1999 I probably would have been hooked, but I played the open beta of Vengence I just couldn't get into it. It seems to me that the FPS genre has progressed beyond rampant dogfighting.

So.... Uh...

[Wandering Wombat]

At what point does it work? I mean, I install the demo, double clock the link, the screen goes black (although my mouse is still visible in the bottom right corner) and.... after twenty minutes my computer reboots. Now, I'm no expert, but that seems like a really crappy game.

Why Was I Modded Troll?

[Wandering Wombat]

I'm asking for help with the demo, and instead of an answer I get a negative moderation. Thats fair.

Linux root access

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

Game cannot be started by user who lacks Administrator access in Windows XP.

I guess this feature explains why it's so hard to port the server to Linux.

(The theory on the TW forums is that it's the cost of another Havok platform license that prevents a port.)