I could not be more excited right now. After the bad sales for Tribes: Vengeance (which is a great game that everyone should buy), most of the community expected to never see a new Tribes game. As you probably know, Tribes has been my favorite online game and I have been playing it for years (since 1999). Well, a few days ago, “Ajaxprojection” (a Garage Games employee) made an extremely interesting post in the TribalWar (the biggest Tribes fansite) forums. He posted: “Hmm…might be a good idea to keep your eyes open around the GarageGames booth at GDC 2006. Never know what kinda things might be shown off…” in a thread titled “Any chance we will ever see another Tribes game?”. Now why do we care? Well after Tribes 2, Sierra closed down the Dynamix studio (the company that made the first two Tribes games). Many of those employees went and created a new company called Garage Games. So really, the company is made up of many of the people that created the first two games.
What is even more interesting is that later on “ajaxprotection” posted a cool video in the forums as well. Watching the video, it looks a whole lot like a Tribes game. Could Garage Games be working on a spiritual successor? Did they actually manage to grab the rights?
The video looks absolutely beautiful. When they left Dynamix, they took Torque (the game engine that Tribes 2 used) with them. Since then they have been modifying and updating the engine. They have created the Torque Shader Engine, which looks great. Included is a completely new terrain engine that allows for huge viewable distances (greater than 4 miles / 7 km).
I can’t wait for GDC to find out more.