A new Tribes game is coming next year and it's not free to play: 'We made some mistakes in how we monetized Ascend'
Video credit: Colonelblair , composer: Leva
It's been 25 years since the original Tribes—formally known as Starsiege: Tribes—made a splash in the world of online shooters, and more than a decade since the release of the most recent entry in the series, the ill-fated Tribes: Ascend. Now a new one is on the way called Tribes 3: Rivals, which is taking signups for «limited playtests» planned to be held over the next several months.
Historically, Tribes games have supported various multiplayer modes, but they're really all about Capture the Flag: Two teams battling to snatch each other's banners and hustle them back to their own base without getting wasted. What set it apart from the crowd were its large, wide-open battlefields and high-speed mobility. One of the series' most distinguishing features is «skiing,» which began as an exploit in the original game and was then added as an official feature in Tribes 2: It allows players to pick up an incredible amount of speed by sliding down slopes, which combined with a jetpack and a good route, lets them soar and glide across the large maps in seconds, snatching the enemy flag like a bird of prey swooping down from the sky.
The Tribes series peaked with Tribes 2, which was a significant success when it came out in 2001. Tribes: Vengeance followed in 2004 with a full-on singleplayer campaign, but it didn't do so well (although I liked it a lot), and after that the series sat until 2012, when Hi-Rez Studios took a run at the free-to-play market with Tribes: Ascend. We rated it very highly but it struggled to find an audience: The final update was released in 2016, and it was removed from sale on Steam a couple years later.
But now it's back, and yeah, it sure sounds like a
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