Currently soaring in the skies over Kickstarter is Midair [official site], a free-to-play first-person shooter clearly based on Tribes. “But Alice, I… isn’t there already a modern free-to-play Tribes?” you ask, tilting your head like a blue tit scoping out a foil milk bottle top on a frosty morning. “No, seriously Alice, enough with the florid similes. There is: Tribes Ascend. They’re even updating it again, aren’t they?” Sorry. Yes, yes, but Midair developers Archetype Studios want a game more like the older Tribes. So they’re making one. They would like your cash to help with that.
Say, reader dear, do you like the future? Do you like jetpacks? Do you like mechs? Do you like first-person shooters? Do you like multiplayer with vehicles and bases? Do you like classic series which folks grumble go forgotten too often? Do you like skill-based movement exploiting weird physics tricks? Do you like free video games?
If you answered yes to at least three of those, hie thee to this website, where Tribes Ascend folks Hi-Rez Studios are offering (almost) the full Tribes world o’games for free, from 1994’s Earthsiege through to 2004’s Tribes Vengeance (their own Ascend, of course, being free-to-play anyway).
As long as this planet continues to spin, there will be a new Intriguing Kickstarter From Folks Who Used To Work On Major Triple-A Franchise X Of The Day. In this case, that Kickstarter is one for Epoch: Return, and the games that once – at least, in pieces, like so many tinker toys scattering from a bucket – emerged from developer Innate’s collective brain are Mass Effect and Dragon Age. But to be perfectly honest, Epoch doesn’t really bear much family resemblance to its distant BioWarian cousins. It takes place on a colossal, open planet that’s ripe for exploring, and you traverse it by way of high-flying momentum-based leaps that strike me as a midpoint between Mirror’s Edge and Tribes 2. It still looks rather floaty, insubstantial, and, well, early, but I definitely like the idea. Watch below.
The jetpack-powered online shooter everybody’s not calling Tribes Not-Four is, of course, now in the hands of Global Agenda devs HiRez. The vast-levelled reboot/remake was at one point theoretically due for a beta in September, but now we have a minor delay but a hard date: November 4 (according to this interview between Cyberlink and HiRez bigwig Todd Harris). That’s when we’ll get our first solid hint as to whether Tribes: Ascend lives up to its forefather’s great land and sky legacy. Read the rest of this entry »
Looks like Firefall is going to have some competition in the persistent-world jetpack revival stakes, as Global Agenda developers Hi-Rez have announced that they now own the Tribes licence, and will be creating a PvP-focused action MMO called Tribes Universe. Details in the announcement post on the Hi-Rez forums are fairly encouraging: “We can’t transform Global Agenda to a large scale battle format but since we liked this concept a lot, we decided to create a new game based on large scale fighting. In order to develop the new game many significant steps had to be taken, including: A significant rewrite to the unreal engine servers to allow for 100+ players to be fighting in the same map, a new UI system that is more efficient, a different implementation of character visuals, a new terrain system, etc.”
Hi-Rez will continue to support Global Agenda, but this new, far more ambitious game will be the focus. Hi-Rez sez: “Alpha testing will begin at the start of the year (about 3 months from now) and Global Agenda players with level 50 characters will have priority in entering Alpha and Beta testing.” Exciting stuff. And interesting that this new game looks like the game Global Agenda players came away from that game wanting.
