It’s a good day to be a Tribes fan! The Tribes intellectual property (and the rest of the Starsiege Universe) is now in the good hands of the folks at GarageGames, a company founded by several former Dynamix employees. After how VU Games treated Tribes Vengeance after launch, I pretty much considered the franchise dead. However, I am now really excited to see what happens to Tribes. For starters, Tribes 1 is being ported over to InstantAction, which is GarageGames’ browser based gaming service. There are currently a bunch of pretty fun games on the service, and I have no doubt that Tribes 1 will fit in pretty well. It will be interesting to see how it does compared to Legions. Legions is a fun game and all, but its nothing compared to Tribes 1. However Legions does have the advantage of some pretty nice graphics. I guess there is nothing to do but sit back and see if gameplay really is more important to most gamers then graphics. Anyway, here are some more specific details provided by the Instant Action Blog:
- GarageGames purchased the ownership of the Tribes IP (all Tribes games) from Activision/Vivendi late last year.
- We do have the source code to the game, and the build has been updated with bug fixes
- The build will be distributed through the website, but still playable as a standalone game.
- The game will use the existing Master Server system that the original game used. We will provide a new master server address with the release.
- The game is not compatible with version 1.11 but you should be able to play the same demos as recorded on previous versions
- Mods and configs used in 1.11 will not be directly compatible, without at least minor changes, as the base game scripts have been cleaned up considerably by Andrew
- The game does NOT have updated graphics, this was a PR misunderstanding. The game does support modern file formats (PNG textures, Zip files)