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Tribes Franchise Quietly Strangled
Gavin Manley writes "Back in October last year, the third game in the Tribes series of first person shooters was released, published by Vivendi Universal Games (VUG). After many years of waiting and frustration, VU once again disappoints, not only by missing their market for the game again but by simply cancelling support for the game." From the article: "Now not only does this have consequences for Tribes fans, but fans of other franchises need to be worried. SWAT 4 in particular. The next SWAT game is also being produced by Irrational Games (no doubt on an equally dismal budget) and published by our good friends at VUG."
I'm an avid tribes player, Tribes1/2 and some TV. The biggest problem is Sierra and Vivendi are horrible about support and management of smaller companies. They are the modern day land barons, they are buying every game franchise they can get their hands on, and killing off any competition they can.
.wav files, so you could listen to everyones special soundpack. Was on Tribalwar and Tribes planet daily reading and posting int he forums, havnt done that in over 3 years.
;) Signed Tribes Boxes
If you follow the forums for most game support you will see the developers are kept in the dark, until they are let go. This is a common trend with them. This is nothing new, they have been doing it for years. Its extremely cheap to hire 2 developers to write patches for a year, but of course, patching isnt included in the budget, so its chopped at first VP's sight.
Its sad, as Tribes was my favorite game, I watched the server count for "Base" the normal game dwindle to a couple that was always full of extremely die hard players. I even collected every sound pack I could and merged them into 1 sound pack, over 800 megs of
Tribescon was my first gamecon I went too, came in 2nd and 1st at the first 2 tribes cons. Even keep 2 signed boxes of tribes on my desk, for the 5 years I played tribes, I played almost daily. (And yes, went to work, school, and had family time..)
Simple, fun, and for a long time, no aimbots. It was on par with counterstrike in pure enjoyment and simple gameplay. Tactical operations, not sci-fi mega weapons. Smooth gameplay, and great maps.
Glad its free, I have both the freely released versions sitting on my HD, think I'll play this weekend. I urge you guys to download and play it, while the graphics of T1 isnt the greatest, it is a pure enjoyable game. T2 was the early engine that Garage games used to launch its business. And wow, how that engine has progressed. I was reading the changelog on the Developers build, the vegetation, and rendering is simple awesome.
BTW, heres whats on my desk at work, -minus the empty cups of coffee.
I thought that I would point out that most of the Tribes developers have moved onto GarageGames and the independent game development scene with the Torque Game Engine.
If you haven't checked out GarageGames or the indie games tha they develop and publish then I highly recommend that you do. There are a variety of great games available to suit anyone's needs (from your puzzle games, to your more traditional FPS ones) and they run a bunch of different OSes such as Windows, OSX and Linux. I think you would be shocked at what has been done.