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."

Comments

This is a shame.

[Gothic_Walrus]

Seeing a series die out like this is never good, especially when it's been one that was as good as the Tribes games were.

Here, it seems worse because they'd actually made at least one big gesture to the community before. Releasing Tribes and Tribes 2 for free may have been for publicity more than anything else, but it was a great decision regardless, and one that bought them some respect from me.

Shame they've just lost that.

Not the first time...

[NetDanzr]

VUG aren't the first to cancel support for a game. I still remember the disastrous Might and Magic IX, which was released as an incredibly buggy POS. The publisher, 3DO, has promptly released a patch that increased the gameplay from 30 minutes to 2 hours before encountering the first game killing bug. They then officially abandoned support for the game, while continuing to sell it for $29.99. It ended up being just another drop in the bucket that sunk the company at the end. Let's hope VUG feels the pinch from mmaking money of unsupported software as well...

Emminent Domain for IP

[TelevisioSledgicus]

This is a good example of why there should be some laws allowing the public to seize IP from companies to prevent it's abuse.

Once an IP holder fails in providing proper support and care for any given intellectual property, a class action style suit should be able to be brought, and if enough public sentiment is behind it, move the IP and all associate assets into the public domain.

Others might argue the Star Wars IP might be another excellent example of IP not given the proper care.

However, I'm sure if all of the Tribes assests were added to the public domain we'd still have an excellent "product" out there, probably running across multiple platforms (linux, OS X, Win32) as well.

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled whining.

Re:Emminent Domain for IP

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a game. It's their property.

No, its NOBODY's property, the government just lets someone pretend like it's theirs for a limited time.

How would you like it if you and I signed a contract to sell you my house, then I bulldozed it? When you copyright something (which is everything you create now), you're entering into a social contract with the country: This is yours for over a hundred years, then it becomes everyone's. By destroying your work after you enjoy your protection and before it enters the public domain, you break that contract.

Still confused

[Dachannien]

I still don't get why game developers feel like they need publishers in this day and age of ubiquitous Internet connections and BitTorrent file distribution. What the industry needs is some nonstandard (read: non-publisher) sources of capital, so that developers can make and sell games under their own judgment without being burdened by marketroid PHB know-it-alls pulling their strings. Combine this with a sales model that utilizes the Internet to get games (legally) from the developer to the consumer, and publishers suddenly become obsolete.

Re:The Warcraft effect

[imr]

Meanwhile, they could have seen that what makes valve and blizzard special is not their games, which are nice but are not the most inventive, but the quality of said games at release time AND the life long support they seem to have afterwards. The dedication to quality some have contrasts heavilly whith the dedication others have to crap on the collective toes of their customers, to the point that blizzard CAN start a game again from scratch when others just released it unfinished and scrap support when "sales are disapointing".

I despise diablo, i find and found starcraft outdated and unoriginal, i found half life quite dull, action wise since i didnt bite the xfile story, BUT i would buy any game of those 2 compagnies without thinking twice BECAUSE I KNOW THERE WILL BE A PATCH for any issue, even 4 YEARS LATER. Same for ID, same for Epics.

And I don't want to ear anything about support costing too much or anything.
Tribes2 linux port was rock stable under linux years before vivendy coughed a little cash to have another patch for windows users. They did it because they had the intend to keep the franchise alive, but they already had lost their customers in the interval.
So doing things right rom the beginning to the end is what is really missing with those publishers. Now that internet is here, ea, vu, atari and the rest are outdated and useless.

BTW, if I'm not mistaking, the author of the tribes2 linux port is now working at blizzard and is the sdl author. There is no coincidence.

Re:A Lament

[Sigma 7]

Okay, anybody who has read my past posts on Tribes knows that I'm about as close as they come to a slavering fanboy when it comes to Tribes. Tribes is the very definition of What A Game Should Be in my book, and I love it in the same way other people love opera, collectible figurines, and reality television. Tribes is what gaming should be. That said, I'm about to propose something that's sure to piss pretty much everybody off:

Tribes, on balance, was made measurably worse by the community.

I couldn't agree more. The first time I played tribes, it was a spawn install to play on avery local LAN - but there were not enough players to support proper gameplay (only 3.) Thus, I went to online play to see what it was like.

The first server I went into had a mod that kicked players out of the inventory selector within 8 seconds. The reason was to get the player to use favourites - which couldn't be set up unless you were at an inventory terminal. The problem doesn't exist in Tribes 2, but such mods can easily nail a community of new players (which is required for any game.)

This just goes to show why a multiplayer game needs to include a filter in the browser to exclude certain gametypes, mods or servers. The more easily junk can be filtered out, the stronger the community can be (as long as the users don't do something stupid like filter out a bot modification that's configured to balance the teams.)