By Jim Rossignol on March 11th, 2011 at 3:27 pm.

Global Agenda creators Hi-Rez studios have announced Tribes: Ascend. Todd Harris, Hi-Rez Studios COO says: “The community has been waiting for a multi-player shooter that is the modern successor to T2. Tribes: Ascend is that game.” And it’s certainly fascinating to see people aiming to take the jetpack crown. Firefall is looking for it, Global Agenda didn’t quite manage it, but will Tribes: Ascend hit that sweet-spot of rocket-propelled combat and vehicular deployment in the vertical? Hi-Rez seem pretty determined.
Excruciatingly footage-free trailer below.


OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY
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If they dont adopt a subscription model they can count me right in.
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GA is pretty good, but you’re right. It didn’t take that Crown.
Firefall is the one to watch, imo. Even this now announcement of Tribes:Ascend doesn’t change that (yet at least)
FF and T:A are both gonna have to work really, really hard to come out on top, and i for one can’t wait.
Competition breeds a better class of game. Lets just hope that Hi-Rez don’t get complacent based on the (former) popularity of the Tribes games.
:)
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Shazbot.
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Seconded.
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I remember it being more like this: (read all four lines from left to right simultaneously for the full effect)
Shazbot! Shazbot! We need more defence! Our flag is mined
Shazbot! Shazbot! Shazbot! Shazbot! Shazbot! Shazbot! Shazbot!
Shazbot! We need more defence! Shazbot! Shazbot!
We need more defence Shazbot! Shazbot!
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Our flag is not in the base! Shazbot!
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As someone who has played a lot of Global Agenda in the past month, I have not too much hope for this – but on the other hand, jetpacks.
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No thank you, untrailer.
However, I missed out on the big-time shooting like Tribes and Planetside first time around (pants AOL dialup and a slow computer), so I’m quite keen to see what happens with this and Planetside Next.
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perhaps devs have noticed that Tribes 2 via Tribes Next is still relatively popular
” I will defend our flag” robot voice
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COO. COO.
I like COO more than other acronyms.
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VGW!
I’d probably need the amount of free time I had in my early twenties to really enjoy it, but I’ll definitely check it out anyway (as long as it’s a tribes game – jet & ski as main way to move around paired with weapons requiring target leading – not the running on the ground with some jet-hopping and hitscan rifles stuff).
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5 quid says they either remove skiing or slow it down to the point of it being pointless.
Fallen Empire: Legions is still the closest thing to the Tribes experience to be produced in the past decade.
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I do wish people would stop going on abou the skiing in Tribes, it was a hugely overated non feature. It was just a bug in the physics engine that a small minority of plays decided to make use of, whilst the rest of us just got on with the game of shooting people. Even in Tribes 2 when they made it a button press most people didn’t bother with it.
Anyway, I for one hope that this new Tribes game owes more to Tribes 1 than 2, as the sequal was just missing some of the magic that made the first one so good.
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Chaz, feel free to voice an opinion about your own play style, Skiing might very well not have been for you, or indeed your friends playing with you.
Its outright false to suggest that it was an ‘overrated non-feature’ that no one actually did, as an avid Tribes 1 and 2 player it shocks me to think anyone could have this belief, did you actually play the same game? It revolutionised movement, capping, combat, it changed the game… It gave you so much more freedom, speed and control…
My one fear is the rife console-isation of games, if i have to go into the menu to turn off ‘Auto-lead’ target i’m gonna go back and wait in the queue for planetside next.
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What?
That’s like saying strafejumping was a non-feature in Quake. It defined the game at anything beyond the very basic levels of player skill. And yes, that too was a physics bug.
Tribes without skiing is not Tribes.
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Liked the shazbot scratched into the armor, and nice kinematics in the hand, but Tribes isn’t about making a fist…I’ll need to see more before I get my hopes up too high.
I’m intensely* interested in any attempt to reboot Tribes, though.
Still, the bar is set pretty high.
* I went by “Writer” back in the T1/T2 days
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I like Global Agenda.
Best of luck to them.
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I bought Global Agenda, played it for half an hour, have not looked at it again. It is sleepy boring time. For me that is.
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I wish I could unbuy Global Agenda.
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After putting 1600 hours into Global Agenda hoping it would get patched into a good game, I can assure all of you this will be a major letdown.
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Global Agenda was/is very much a niche game; if you didn’t play it for high-end team-based competitive play, it was lack-luster in nearly every regard. Personally, I loved the game, but I also played it from a perspective that very few people have (I had the good fortune of playing in many of the top agencies/clans), and that niche view can’t really forgive game design the prevents enjoyment from the larger playerbase.
My hope is that Global Agenda is HiRez’s TF2: A testing sandbox for them to learn from so that their later games can profit from it. I wish I could say that the cost of purchasing the IP alone would be motivation enough for the company to do a good job with the game, but from what I understand Global Agenda still hasn’t turned a profit, so I doubt monetary motivation is enough to be confident in this endeavor.
On the plus side, it’s been very apparent since day 1 of GA that HiRez is infatuated with Tribes, so hopefully that zeal will translate into a solid gameplay experience.
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Good god I played Starsiege Tribes until it was coming out of my ears. I used to have so much fun. It wasn’t until months down the road I realised you could do the skiing thing, which enhanced it no end.
I think I mostly played a mod, where you had heavy, scout, sniper etc skins and loadouts. I think it was a mod. But man, the sheer size of maps. Remember the vast landscapes with two huge floating fortresses, one at each end of a lush green valley? Those were the days.
I would love to see that come back, I really would. Just something of the old gameplay.
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Sounds like you played the Renegade Mod.. Ah, good times running around invisible and planting plastic explosives on people >:)
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At first I thought this post was instructing something called ‘Hi-Rez Announce Tribes’ to ascend. I have been reading too much MSPaint Adventures.
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2011? how long have they been working on this already? global agenda isnt that old either. did they develope it simoultanesly?
anyways. i actually never played tribes and only played global agenda for half an hour maybe.
i guess this game wont be such a huge success as the fans of tribe would expect, but who am i to guess?
i also guess blizzards next gen mmo, codename titan, will probably be the next tribes. already looking forward to titan so i can get back to my gaming roots, the shooters.
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I think I played Tribes once, …found it confusing. Then I played Global Agenda on closed beta, and found it a Ok game with very good graphics. Turns Global Agenda has not aged well, and have not found the love that the game deserve :( … is sad because the game is not bad, is not worst than TF2, and HiRez seems hardworking people with multiple talents :D
I am not sure about the ex-tribes community. Do these people is a niche big enough to make a game?
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This will compete directly with Firefall, which makes me very curious about what business model they’ll adopt, considering Firefall will be free to play (and so far looks awesome)
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I might be interested if they add a single-player campaign like that in Tribes: Vengeance, or at the very least the option of playing skirmish against bots. Otherwise, no deal for me. I don’t do multiplayer-only games.
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Hell yeah!
Tribes and Tribes 2 were two of my favourite FPSs ever. The sense of freedom that skiing gave you was unreplicated in any other game to date.
And the inventory loadouts, oh boy! We had cool games back then ;)
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Oh man, here come the memories. Nothing quite like sniping a guy in the face when he’s 1000 feet in the air and watching his dead body drop like a rock. Mortars landing at your feet got your heart pumping too! I hope they can pull this off.
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With hardly anything to show of either game, it’s going to be tough to predict the winner of this one. Perhaps Firefall will nail the business model but that’s speculation based on who they have at Red 5, as for the game itself I would probably put Firefall at the advantage as well. Hi-Rez only grabbed the Tribes license last year and went straight ahead and announced an MMO. Sitting back and stroking my imaginary beard until the rest of the shit hits the fan I think.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gslOnN3zWmA
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Oh please let this be great.
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It’s funny that he doesn’t mention Tribes: Vengeance
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Next up, the return of Starsiege.
Pretty please?
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Ah Tribes.
The first online game that I really got into, as a kid at the time it was pretty unbelievable. The sheer scope of things, the load outs, complexity, skiing and of course – the teamwork.
While Tribes 2 was great, it didn’t click like the first did; however I’ll still play Tribes Next from time to time – it’s unbelievable how well the game has held up to this day.
Hell, I’ll go out on a limb and say Tribes Vengeance was a good game – it’s singleplayer was rather decent. In a Tribes game, who’d have thought. Shame the multiplayer was steps back, even if it was quite good, and items like the grappling hook were enjoyable. The visual direction was nice as well, Tribes 2 was a bit dreary.
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Tribes: Vengeance never happened
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It did happen and it was quite good. There. I said it.
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If you pause at 0:59 you can see two dudes playing rock paper scissors :P
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Ha, glad to see Hi-Rez knows DS was always the best.
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Am I the only one who finds it funny that they are posting quotes praising a game they had absolutely nothing to do with in a trailer that shows no gameplay. Why aren’t they posting quotes about Global Agenda? Oh right, GA was a bad game.
From the guys who thought Tribes was really good and bought the name comes Tribes: Ascended
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Drools thinking about how good this game could be if its heavily based on Tribes gameplay… I loved that game and liked Tribes 2 as well as many of the crazy addon servers. I can hope this game has a glimpse of the awesomeness that Tribes had… 2011 is a crazy year for PC gaming :)
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Barely anyone remembers that Starsiege Tribes is spiritually related to Starsiege, which in turn is the successor to the Earthsiege series of games that served as Mechwarrior competitors.
All of which is to say: I miss my mech games. :(
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Wasn’t there supposed to be a Mechwarrior reboot coming? There was this insanely awesome trailer a year or so ago and then nothing.
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I’ve not heard a peep out of Mechwarrior 5′s makers, Smith and Tinker, other than this is apparently not the only thing they’re working on – they also have a Marvel-based collectible card game thingy in the works for Facebook and mobile devices.
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Fuck. Yes.
Tribes 2 got me into multiplayer gaming, and I’ve never been happy with the increasing slow paced movement of these realism shooters.
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>Ascend, built using Unreal Engine 3 and featuring jetpacks, skiing, and vehicles.
>Built using Unreal Engine 3
>Unreal Engine 3
… Sigh. They had to go and make the same mistake that was made on Vengeance.
Bad netcode and no support for the entirely moddable UI(!!) that Torque provided.
I really hope they make a good game, I do. I hope the UE3 engine doesn’t gimp it.
..But my expectations aren’t high.
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Seeing as Tribes 2 sucked goats, I’m not interested. Starsiege: Tribes was amazing, give me a successor to that one. I’m kind of hoping for that second Section 8 game, if they bettered some of the stuff from the first one.
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