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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."
Let's face it.. Tribes 1 was awesome. Tribes 2, better but kind of "eh". Tribes 3.. terrible.
You make a crappy game, no one's going to buy it, and no one's going to care when support is pulled.
Just my two cents..
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Tribes 1 was fun until every server became one of those infinite ammo, shoot a billion rounds a second, every bullet explodes kind of games. I had a blast playing when you had to actually aim and it was actually kind of hard to kill people. I stopped playing when every time you fired you created a small nuclear war. Never even bought tribes 2.
If there still are servers on Tribes 1 that maintain original game play, or even use just a few of the cool addons (not nuclear chain gun ones) let me know.
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.
Goo goo g'joob.
* Presses 'V' *
* Presses 'G' *
* Presses 'S' *
jmole: Shazbot!
The true hard core fans of Tribes 1 were very vocal in what they wanted and asked for it in simple terms. Take Tribes 1 and build on it, making the sequels almost the same but with better graphics and new maps. Instead the developers made completely different games each time. Why? The original game was fun beyond all belief. I fail to understand why you take something that is proven to be enjoyable by all and change it, hoping that people will like something else when you've already got them hooked.
It was right for support to be pulled on this as most of the fan base for Tribes had left long ago. Let this be a warning to any other game studio that thinks it would be a bright idea to package a "different game" as a sequel to another game with the same name. You will kill your fan base. Tribes could have been a very strong title to this day had they simply followed the example that ID put forward with Quake I/III or the Doom series.
"Keep it simple stupid" and "If it ain't broke don't fix it."
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...
aah, nothing quite like seeing a good game series destroyed by a publisher that cares about nothing but profit. Everyone remember the tribes 2 fiasco? It went something like this:
Dynamix: Tribes 2 isn't ready, we need to delay it.
Vivendi: Release the game now.
Dynamix: It's not ready.
Vivendi: We don't care, release the game now.
Dynamix: Okay.
Vivendi: This game sucks. No ones buying it, and those who did are returning it.
Dynamix: We told you the game wasn't ready.
Vivendi: You're fired.
Aah, what a brilliant and refreshing management strategy. Is anyone really surprised that tribes 3 was a dismal failure?
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
No need to guess whether SWAT 4 will be a problem: the demo has been out for a month. It looks great to me.
Tribes, on balance, was made measurably worse by the community.
I'm not just talking about griefers, lamers and TKers; that's universal and understandable. I'm also talking about server admins and modders. There were some fantastic mods floating about out there--well thought-out, balanced mods that made the game substantially different, better and/or cooler. There were also some decent but decidedly less-thought out mods out there, mods which nerfed heavies/snipers/pilots/etc, mods which made weapons entirely too deadly, mods which presented poorly planned, poorly executed maps, mods that futzed with physics in a way that was amusing for five minutes then tedious--you've played 'em. What's more, there were junior modders who'd take a good mod and add their own little melange of spices, spawning 'renegades' variants and the like.
All well and good, but once this got underway, it became a serious challenge to find a decent game to join. The vast majority of servers would be running some mod or other--and if you didn't know the mod, you'd get your ass handed to you on a silver platter for several hours until you learned all the various idiosyncrasies therein. Other servers required client-side downloads--a real annoyance when all you want to do is hop on a game and play. It was not uncommon to find only two or three servers running a "standard" game--and these servers would generally either be packed to capacity or dead empty.
I know it's not cool to rail on the community, but I honestly think that it played a real role in making the game less playable overall. Yes, there are tons of other factors in play--for example, Dynamix/VU could have shelled out for a couple dozen dedicated base servers. Yes, I could have S'ed the FU and run my own server (which I did for some time back in the day, by the way--admittedly with my own half-baked mod...) Yes, a number of clans did original, stunning, amazing work worthy of mountains of praise. But when it comes right down to it, I really think that Tribes as a game was hurt more than it was helped by the community at large.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
Hence developers need publishers. Specifically publishers who have blanket deals with retailers to move the merchandise.
The majority of purchases are at retail stores. The online distribution market isn't mature enough as there are few issues that have to be overcome.
1. Not all customers for a game have broadband access.
2. Some games are still too large to download in a timely manner even with broadband.
3. Too many people expect a discount when using a downloaded version while completely ignoring the fact that it does cost the seller money for the bandwidth used.
4. Most people still want something they can touch.
5. Many games would receive no notice if it were not for publishers.
All those things and more stand in the way.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Tribes died when Sierra canned Tribes 2. This is news? :)
VUG are just doing what they should as a business, it is not profitable to provide support for a game that doesn't get played by enough people.
It's a shame to see such a potentially great franchise go down in such a bad way
Business Voyeur
Maybe the folks at Vivendi are experiencing the same problem that EA identified earlier in the week - World of Warcraft is so damned popular that it wrecked everyone else's holiday sales, and is continuing to hold the interest of gamers, who continue to not buy new games. VU is certainly no stranger to this problem - Starcraft and Half-Life (Well, Countrstrike anyway), both VU distributed titles, have been biting into sales for years. Everquest has also been noted as a title that eats away at the market for years.
Perhaps the reason VU is pushing WoW so hard, both in the US and internationally, while cutting funds to other games, is that the execs have realized that VUs most successful games will continue to cannibalize other game sales, so it's better to just push on with a guaranteed cash cow.
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.
... it's not the cure to AIDS, it's a game. It's their property.
jesus spin-fuck christ
Hey, I don't think you're making the best use of your house. I think I'll take it from you.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I was always a big fan of Tribes 1 and didn't mind the mods, but one thing that comes to mind even though it wasn't really Tribes itself.
When Counter-Strike came out I was pissy because there weren't enough good servers out there and I was pissed off that one map was taken out of official rotation.
So I went down to a local ISP and started my own game server. This was back in the days when you had thousands mom and pop local ISP's around the nation. They has decent connection and the server was always packed and I had a good time being the admin.
Now a days you can rent your own servers etc etc or if you are lucky enough to happen to have a 1.5 mb down and up DSL connection you can do it for free.
So yes the community on a whole will still suck but when you have the ability to create your own server and carve out your little niche. This isn't like an MMORPG where you have no control over the situation. It just takes a little effort and DYI.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's called "public domain." (But you probably already knew that.)
Oh, but that's right, it won't release to the public domain for approximately another 150 years. Fuck WIPO!
Yep - too many mods.
Sucks too - there's nothing like being part of a bomber crew, or jumping out of a havoc with 4 other heavies and pwning the enemy gens / ff gens. Or lobbing tank mortars onto the vpad from a mile away with the help of a scout with a targetting laser.
Tribes 2 had more opportunities for more kinds of teamwork than any other game to date, but with a billion flavors of the game and no official servers, the player base just got too fragmented to find games or tribes to join.
Tribes as a whole has been a series of games that I have followed for a long time. Most of my Clan member are Tribes fanatics, where Im the founder of said group. I remember the day when Sierra let Dynamix team go. Things changed , and then the concepts of what the game was supposed to be changed. No more Full bomber team. No more full Carrier of heavies raining down mortars on the Katabatic base. No more Full tank squads. The Pod was a sorrowful comparison to the Shrike.
Sorrowfully, the promise that it would ever get better never materialized. The Engine was sold to Garage Games, and the final patch to the game was somewhat of a joke. There are still Base players out there that play Classic Base , Clans like Rebel Dawgs , Gigawa and LadyDeth the founders ( www.rebeldawgs.com ). But the community there is so largely fragmented its sometimes hard to get any validity out of it. I give the clan credit where credit is due. They do well.
Then Sierra Released T:V. The promise of an exciting single player game (that fell horribly short and the plotline was a joke), and fantastic multiplayer game (based on unreal engine, who can go wrong with that, I mean seriously). Well the game play was OK, I was hyped, Id been a Tribes fan for a long time. Most of the older GWoS Team members that had been inactive for so long had come out of the woodwork to play it. The Team play sucked, it in no way comparted to Tribes 2. There was one patch, and that was it. The game play was ok, The single player was a joke, the dynamic just wasnt there.
And I wasnt the only one that felt that way, Numerous clans had come on to play T:V , and there are some that walked away faster than I have considered doing.
Just another clear sign that VUG is largely incapable of supporting a game to the level that it should. I really feel sorry for SWAT Fans. I really do.
KB.
http://clan.gwos.org
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Despite all its warts, I honestly love Tribes 2 and am starting to get into T:V.
/.'ed.
This isn't all that much of a surprise, VUG has done a variety of nasty things to the Tribes Community before. For example, recently they locked out all T2 users by flagging that there was an upgrade, but not actually posting a file for the updater to download. That caused the T2 client to go into an infinite loop. Fortunately, the community provided a command line work around. There have been about half a dozen BS stunts like this.
The best thing that could happen is for VUG's sites be get
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
Pickings are slim for Tribes 2 servers nowadays. I keep hoping I'll find out about some alternative server lists somewhere....
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Is it still tangentially a spin-off of the Police Quest series? Is it still Darrel F. Gates? Those games ruled back in the day...
Irrational, the devs of Tribes Vengence, are one of my favorite companies. Ken Levine is one smart cookie.
But it seemed that all of the sudden, they went from doing Freedom Force to juggling two more games that seemed little more than outsourcing. Judging by reviews and demos, it seems that neither Swat or Tribes are horrible, merely above average.
So I wonder if Irrational didn't just need some extra cash infusion to be able to self-publish Freedom Force: 3rd Reich, or hire more people for the upcomiing Bio Shock (unofficial sequel to System Shock II)? Or whether Sierra/VU publishing FF did not include somewhere in the deal some on-the-fly development on some festering properties if only to keep the body warm
As for T:V, well personally I think the community got what it deserved. When Irrational and such was trying to get feed back, it always boiled down to Tribes 1 fans wanting this and Tribes 2 fans wanting that. I played T:V it's just as buggy and floaty feeling as Tribes 2. Sure its faster than original Tribes 2 but it never came close to the break neck speed we were use too in Tribes.
It's time for the Tribes franchise to just die off. They were good games overall, but the lack of support and piss poor communities were its downfall. And yes I think the communities were utter shit, Counter Strike has more maturity out of its millions of 12 year old wallhacking players than the Tribes community had and has.
Aw Frell this
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.
You gotta let em know! It's people! Soylent Green is people! You gotta let em know!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.
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.
First there is the Legends game based off of the Torque engine. This game is very Tribes-like.
http://hosted.tribalwar.com/legends/
Then there is Renwerx, which will virtually redo Legends in the near future. They are looking for help.
http://renwerx.com/
Journal
No other game has required such a combination of skill, reaction speed, and hand-eye coordination. I've played BF1942, Planetside, Halo, BFV, T2, CS:S, and many others, many of them at the competitive level, and nothing came as close to the old thrill of competitive sports as T:V. The companies involved in making the game made three big mistakes: 1 - Releasing the game the same time as Half Life 2 and Doom 3. There's no way it could compete. 2 - No marketing at all. As a result, only the existing Tribes community was interested, and they are quite frankly the most embarassingly spoiled and childish game community I've ever seen. And that's saying a lot, seeing how I've played just about every MMORPG out there. 3 - Even though they only marketed to the existing community, which is only interested in the multiplayer, they spent at least half their resources on the singleplayer game. The singleplayer portion of the game wasn't bad, but it was definitely a waste of time. That amount of resources could've been spent to create a near-perfect multiplayer experience. I maintain, though, that the resulting game is the most intensively-skillful multiplayer experience to date. So intensive that half the veteran Tribes community could not even handle the new Grappler abilities. All the skill of the older Tribes plus a Spiderman-like Grappler leads to the most amazing mobility seen in a game. (And think about it, a society that has developed jetpacks and frictionless boots not having a Grappler or some other option for controlling movement while "skiing" doesn't make sense. The argument that the Grappler some how REDUCED the skill involved...just seems stupid to me. You've still gotta be as good at skiing and jetting as before, PLUS now the Grappling). The point is that the usual poisonous attitude internet flameboys take towards EVERYTHING ruined a very good game. It's so un-cool on the internet to actually like something that EVERYTHING gets thrown under the tires. For god's sake, 90% of the internet comments about HL2 are even negative, and that's not even including comments about Steam. I didn't put much weight in internet opinion before, but now I've even seen the tangible damage it can do, and I'm sick of it. Since someone has always said it better, I'll end with a quote: "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you - YOU'RE COOL - fuck you, I'm out." - Scarface, Half Baked
To see a relevant example, take a look at the Legends project, which uses the successor to the engine used for Tribes 2 to develop a new game. Legends is nowhere near retail quality, but that's mostly for lack of artists, which they now have (contributed from the Renegades project). Gamers have the ability to join the project and make this game what they truly want, just as open source users can extend an open source product to meet their own needs. Got a gaming itch that no retail game satisfies? Come scratch it by becoming a developer!
Tribes is a great online game because it blends action with strategy.
Tribes was also one of the first online FPS games with useful vehicles.
Tribes also had classes and deployables before these things were fashionable.
Unfortunately, the all-too-common Tribes fan variant, otherwise known as the TribalWhore, went half-cocked kicking and screaming for everything but these fundamentals.
Perhaps you've heard the calls for jetpacks and skiing ? This 'aint Duke Nuke'em Forever set in the Rockies. Folks who thought these were the foundations of Tribes got exactly what they wanted with the last game in the franchise.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the franchise now all but dead. Luckily there's no patent on vehicles, deployables, strategy... or jetpacks and skiing for that matter.
Regards, Lex
I guess I somehow thought that the Tribes series would always be there, however this latest incarnation has proven the opposite: Take a look at the amount of servers for Tribes 1 (Over 200), then Tribes 2 (over 150) then T:V (Under 50) and you see how much it has failed. To think, there are over 200 servers for a game that came out in 1998, that isn't Half-Life!
Unfortunately, I have nothing to say that is insightful or that hasn't been mentioned in some way before that would help this game survive. People voted with their wallet with Tribes: Vengeance, and in my opinion any chance of there being a Tribes 4 (Or Starsiege: Tribes 2) washed away with the lack of this patch being released. Truly a sad day.
Marketing just came up with new Soylent Clear: Clearly More Soylent, Clearly Less People!
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.