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The "world's fastest shooter" Tribes returns for a sixth entry - new footage lands ahead of playtest

Reportedly it's called Tribes 3: Rivals

A screengrab of a playest of a new Tribes game, showing the player high above a sandy map with buildings in the distance
Image credit: Prophecy Games/FPS-Z
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News by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell News Editor
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There's a new Tribes FPS in development, eight years since the last Tribes game, Tribes: Ascend, went skeeting off into the no-further-updates hereafter. It's the work of former Hi-Rez subsidiary and nowadays independent studio Prophecy Games, and going by SteamDB listings, it's called Tribes 3: Rivals.

New to the Tribes series? It once went by the unofficial title of "the world's fastest shooter". On the one hand, I'm not sure that claim holds as true in the era of Titanfall 2 or DOOM Eternal or Hyper Demon or heck, even latter-day Fortnite with its rocket-powered rams. On the other hand, and to pick up the tune from Matt Cox's (RPS in peace) 2019 retrospective - WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Here's a compilation of footage from a recent playtest.

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Yep, that still looks like a sci-fi FPS built around fluid rocket-skating over pleasantly undulating geography, with players grabbing flags and hitting the map boundary in the time it'd take a Battlefield soldier to flop-to-prone in disbelief and outrage. FPS-Z are reporting that the new game is in the early stages of development - please bear that in mind when viewing the below selection of screengrabs.

A screengrab of a playest of a new Tribes game, showing the player high above a sandy map with buildings in the distance
A screengrab from a new Tribes FPS, showing the player high above a sandy desert map with red damage indications on the HUD
A screengrab from a playtest of a new Tribes game, showing a player character in red armour on the lobby screen
A screengrab of a playest of a new Tribes game, showing a player with a blue-toned rifle running up a slope towards a metal fortress
Image credit: Prophecy Games/FPS-Z

FPS-Z quote an unnamed developer as saying that "a lot of the core team from TA is still involved in the development for this new TRIBES game, especially on the maps and physics side". Prophecy are planning further, large-scale playtests this week - they're aiming for Wednesday 29th and/or Thursday 30th November. You'll be able to hear more via the Tribes discord, if you don't read it here first. According to a Discord FAQ, they're only testing 5v5 CTF for the moment.

Prophecy's other projects include Starsiege Deadzone, launched this July, which appears to have a narrative connection to Tribes 3 - both the original Tribes and the first Starsiege game are spin-offs from Dynamix's Metaltech: Earthsiege, released way back in 1994.

Deadzone is a considerably slower and gloomier sci-fi corridor extraction game, featuring collapsing, procedurally generated starships. Which sounds pretty appetising to me, though the game isn't performing too well among Steam user reviewers. Any thoughts to add to all this, returning Tribes players?

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