The game, a follow-up to Tribes: Ascend, is being developed by a studio that was originally founded under the umbrella of Hi-Rez studio, which originally worked on Tribes: Ascend before it moved on to other titles. Prophecy Games has since gone on to become an independent studio.

Details on the game are currently quite sparse aside from a few screenshots released on the game’s Discord channel. Going by these screenshots, however, it looks like the new Tribes game will follow tradition in being a movement-focused multiplayer shooter with unique weapons.

One of the core things that set the Tribes games apart from its contemporaries, as well as to many modern multiplayer shooters, is its emphasis on fast-paced movement with massive maps featuring team-based game modes like Capture the Flag.

The new Tribes title seems to be under development on PC.

Hi-Rez Studios’ Tribes: Ascend, arguably its first breakout free to play game which would fuel its further involvement in the genre, has begun to receive support again. The developer revealed a new patch for the game, which would be its first in +2 years, and some scant notes were released on the same.

You can check out the notes on Google Docs as per creative director Sean McBride but keep in mind that these are only a small part of the overall patch details to come. As for the confirmed changes, they’re nothing less than sweeping – a new map will be added and the game’s nine classes will be narrowed down to three – Light, Medium and Heavy, each with nine loadouts that are free to all. Base class loadouts, including default items, will be free and a number of tweaks are coming for weapons.

Expect the patch to release on public test servers on September 14th, though Hi-Rez states that, “We know this will leave some weapons statistically non-viable, or lead to some ‘broken’ builds. These issues will be addressed in a future PTS balance patch. A main focus of this test is to identify the key balance issues created by this transition.”

Thoughts on all the changes? Let us know in the comments.

Todd Harris, COO of Hi-Rez Studios stated, “SIEGE has always been a great opportunity for Hi-Rez to both share what it has learned and also benefit from the experiences of others. We have always enjoyed presenting our games locally, and receiving feedback from the community here.”

President of the GGDA Andrew Greenberg said, “Hi-Rez Studios has been generating a great deal of excitement, both in the South and internationally. Its recent Tribes: Ascend game has garnered accolades all over the globe, and its upcoming release of SMITE has become one of the most anticipated titles of the year.”

SIEGE is an interesting amalgation of features leading figures from various regions of the gaming industry, including artists, programmers, designers, investors, writers, teachers and business executives, as everyone unites to share their experiences. It is currently scheduled for October 4th to 7th at the Marriott Atlanta NW.

The Marksman update introduces new weapons for the sentinel, pathfinder and solider and most importantly, Tribes is going auf Deutsch, with over 92 million native speakers this probably isn’t a bad move, even if this new update video is at best vaguely embarrassing and worst slightly racist.

Sitting pretty with 86% on Metacritic with 8.5/10 from us, why aren’t you already playing Tribes: Ascend?

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note the evolution of gaming’s future; how things looked back then and just how the future has changed our notions on it’s nature, whether we noticed it or not.

Free-to-Play

Then: A little more than a decade ago, there were freeware games. Designed to be available at no cost or optional fee, such games survived…well, it’s hard to say exactly how they survived. This was during the dotcom bubble of the early 21st century, and when it burst, causing several freeware game portals to shut shop, a lot of the distribution went with them.

More part of an underground movement than alternative development, freeware games looked to offer more than your typical gaming experience.

Now: A nifty freeware game released in 2001 featured first person shooting on hoverboards. In 2012, Hi-Rez Studios used this concept to create the successful Tribes: Ascend, a shooter that was totally free but who’s premium features could be unlocked quicker with a one-time payment. It’s not necessarily known when the flood-gates opened but free gaming is now about catering to the maximum audience possible, marketing a highly successful brand but converting it to fit free-to-play purposes.

Ubisoft has outlined how important F2P is for their burgeoning overseas markets, while EA transformed Command & Conquer: Generals 2 into an F2P property known simply as Command & Conquer. Freeware games still exist, as can be noticed with the number of titles available for mobiles, but free-to-play looks to mirror it while still turning a profit and capitalising on existing brands.

Indie Gaming

Then: Freeware was only a part of the underground game development scene, which comprised of mods, fan maps, mutators, new character models, hacks and oh-so much more. Quality arcade shooters could be had online, dungeon crawlers born from Nethack were common place – but distribution and commercial success? That was reserved for a few chosen souls. id Software started small, developing several properties including a Mario knockoff that was eventually rejected by Nintendo, before revolutionising first person shooters.

Minh “Gooseman” Le developed the insanely popular Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life and was picked up by Valve (along with several other modders) after it recorded higher numbers than Unreal Tournament and Quake 3: Arena combined. But for every success story, there were plenty of people left in the dark, tweaking their works continuously, in hopes of getting “noticed”. It became less about creating a cool game, and more about filling a portfolio, creating mods and models in hopes of landing a plush job with the big boys. The number of Counter-Strike clones and alternative mods is testament to this, though a good number of modders did it because it was fun.

Now: Steam. XBox Live Arcade. Mobile gaming. Free-to-play. Kickstarter. Which avenue would you prefer? Would you like to create an old-school action platformer, all by yourself, like Dust: An Elysian Tail? Do you want to create a crazy, icky, demented rogue dungeon crawler? Do you want to just give people a worthy distraction, catering to simpler conventions within a puzzle game interface like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope? Do you want to just get the best possible blockbuster out there, and have your audience pay only when they want to like Tribes: Ascend?

Don’t get us wrong. Indie game development is still incredibly hellacious and coming up with an awesome concept is tougher than ever. But with Steam Greenlight and The Summer of Arcade, there’s certainly no lack of platforms for one’s awesome ideas. Mods like Black Mesa still exist, but they’re fewer and farther in between, having been replaced by DLC.

Sequels

Then: Talk to any game developer from the 90’s and they will tell you how hard it is to make a sequel. It’s not simply about giving gamers more of what they want, but expanding on the property as well. Try something new and you risk alienating fans. Stick to the same thing, and you miss out on adding to your user base.

But sequels didn’t just come about as flukes – oftentimes, only the most successful games received sequels. Which made sense: If it made you a ton of money last time, why not do it again? Then again, most sequels took years to release, and were at the behest of fans and critics alike. Do you think Bioware would have green lit it’s greatest RPG of all time, Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, if the first game had flopped? Unlikely.

Now: Thanks to the blockbuster-ization of gaming, we now have yearly sequels for well known AAA properties like Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty. Even the bigger games like Uncharted, Killzone, Halo and Splinter Cell have at least two years between each successive title.

It’s not so much about new ideas or innovating – oftentimes, you can create some new textures, a few minor gameplay additions and a new story with the same mission types without making any drastic changes. And whether you expand your base is unimportant, since your job is to cater to the millions currently lusting for your product.

Spin-offs are also more common, thanks to the dominance of hand-held markets. Don’t even get us started on the deluge of Pokemon titles since the success of the initial run on the Gameboy. The vaunted Final Fantasy is now a shell of it’s former self, thanks to a single designer’s obsession with a virtual woman.

Metal Gear Solid seems to be the only franchise still taken seriously, and why not? Every new addition, be it portable or console, has received an inordinate amount of fine-tuning and polish from Hideo Kojima. Even if MGS: Ground Zeroes releases in late 2013, that’s still more 5 years after MGS4: Guns of the Patriots. In that time, Kojima Productions has crafted an entirely new engine, and if early footage is any indicating, Ground Zeroes will play significantly less like earlier titles while still embodying the spirit of the franchise.

That does it for the first part of this feature. Join us next time for part 2, as we look at the ever-evolving nature of gaming’s future. Sound off in the comments below about how different things are now, from when you envisioned the future all those years ago.

(Title image property of Pyxelated from Deviantart)

This new update adds some new features to the Technician Class, new maps for the Quick Play queue and more. But the most interesting addition is the game mode, Blitz. Every time the flag is taken, it’s next location changes, mixing things up in a round-robin fashion.

As a new weapon, the Twinfusor is a modified version of the original Fusor that shoots two disks. Not as powerful, but still quite deadly in succession, it makes a great shotgun meets grenade launcher weapon.

On top of that, developer HiRez Studios has introduced new maps, clan tags, skins, voice packs and lots of balances to perks and devices.

Tribes: Ascend has launched on Valve’s Steam service.

You can download the game from here.

The fast-paced, free-to-play multiplayer shooter has received a strong critical reception from the gaming press.

Tribes: Ascend has over one million registered users, and the move to Steam, combined with international servers and language support, will expose the title to millions more worldwide.

Says Todd Harris, Hi-Rez Studios Chief Operating Officer, “We’re very excited to partner with Valve and deliver the World’s Fastest Shooter to the world’s largest gaming community.”

The updated version of Tribes: Ascend available on Steam will introduce a new Capture The Flag map called Stonehenge and a new Team Deathmatch map, as well as first-person spectator mode to support the growing Tribes competitive community

We had reviewed the game which you can check over here.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Tribes: Ascend does not address most of these issues. For instance, it does nothing about the multiplayer heavy focus of modern shooters (although one could argue that that has been a characteristic of the genre ever since the proliferation of LAN and the internet in the late ’90s), for instance. It is entirely a multiplayer game, with no singleplayer mode whatsoever to speak of. And it can be argued that Tribes: Ascend falls prey to the modern convention of reusing the same few tired modes for the multiplayer as well. Capture the Flag and Deathmatch both make an unsurprising appearance here, as do some classic Tribes modes, such as Control Point.Even elements from the previous games, such as jetpacks, are present in the game, meaning that it can’t exactly be pointed at as a shining beacon of creativity or originality.

What Tribes does do, however, is return triumphantly to its original design that made the original game such a cult classic back when it was released, and it manages to be fresh in all the ways that matter. In the present day market that is dominated by drab military shooters with the same set of physics, controls, modes, and hell, even similar settings and maps, Tribes: Ascend comes off as a bit of a breath of fresh air.

Tribes puts the focus first and foremost, squarely and entirely, on the shooting. The gunplay is all Tribes is about. There is no needless exposition, no ‘cinematic’ storytelling via garish cutscenes, no explosions, and no plot about a modern day conspiracy involving North Korea, the Middle East, Russia, and terrorists. Tribes is all about the shooting, and it is about making the shooting fun and an experience to be relished every single time, and boy, does it do a great job of that. Playing entirely differently from every other shooter on the market, Tribes is blazing fast. Over time, shooters have changed pace from the slower, much more deliberate arena shooters that dominated PC gaming at the end of the last century to the much more twitch based action shooters that dominate console gaming today, but Tribes is an entirely different beast, that makes every other game on the market feel sluggish by comparison.

It’s ironic, really, how the game goes about it, because the actual shooting itself is actually slower than what you’d expect. Your bullets and weapons usually explode after a slight delay, meaning you can’t expect to just point, aim, and shoot at your enemy. Instead, Tribes requires you to stop, look at your enemy’s trajectory, project where he’s going to be a split second from now, and shoot there, all in the matter of a fraction of a second. Therefore, even though it’s a much slower and deliberate pace than other shooters, it happens blazing fast, and it adds an unexpected element of tactical depth to the game, while also retaining spontaneity and favoring fast reflexes. It is really quite like nothing else on the market, and it is impossible to overstate just how much of a difference this can make on the gameplay. It might seem to be an unnecessary added wrinkle to the tried and tested shooting mechanics that you are familiar with at first, but it really elevates the experience to an altogether new level.

Of course, it is hard to anticipate where your opponent will be at all, and hard to get an aim at him, because of how Tribes handles movement. You can walk and run through an entire Tribes arena, but that is missing the point entirely, and besides, you’ll be riddled with bullets before you know what hit you. No, movement in Tribes is a different beast entirely, one that it might take you some time getting used to, and one that will definitely change how you approach the game entirely.

You see, I mentioned earlier in the review that Ascend brings back the series’ traditional jetpacks; this changes things entirely. The jetpacks let you glide uphill for a limited period of time, and you can ‘ski’ down slopes downhill. All of this results in some crazy movement speeds, and some on the fly planning and rerouting of your character, as you try to dodge the incoming enemy interception en route to the enemy flag.

These crazy movement speeds mean that you have to take your enemies’ movement into account at all times when aiming and shooting, and also your own. It also means that you have to move in such a way while shooting that you yourself never become a stationary target, and hence remain hard to hit. It’s a beautiful game, more psychological than anything else, and it results in Tribes being more satisfying than any other shooter in recent memory.

That Tribes is so incredible is further augmented by the fact that it is a free to play game. Let that be no mark or indictment against the game’s merits. It is probably the single greatest F2P game ever made, and it can go toe to toe with most pay to play games on the market.

The biggest fallacy a free to play game can make is gimping the game entirely too much for the people who don’t play and favoring the people that do, thereby breaking the balance of the game. Tribes walks the line finely, but it often falls on the wrong side. The player who starts playing for free gets access to only three classes and the default weapons, and theoretically, every other class and weapon is within his reach without spending a single penny by devoting (a lot of) time to the game, and earning unlocks. However, unlocking things requires an inordinate amount of time, to the extent that it often feels like the game is taunting you, dangling so many extra weapons and classes right before you, but keeping them just out of your reach unless you pony up and pay.

That, however, is a characteristic of all free to play games, and let’s face it, it’s probably even a necessary evil. A game like Tribes, looking as good as it does, and being as well made as it is, requires not just money to compensate for its production, but also upkeep. Therefore, trying to get some degree of payment from every user seems to be fair, as there really is no such thing as a free lunch after all.

The problem is when Tribes begins to inordinately favor its paying populace. For instance, the first time you pay to unlock any weapon or class, your account immediately gets promoted to VIP status for life, meaning, for instance, you get double experience in every game you play. This puts you at a distinctly unfair advantage if you’re a free user, since the paying players, already having earlier access to all the better weapons and classes, will also get naturally better at the game at a much faster rate. Of course, the argument can be made that the more serious Tribes player will probably be willing to plonk some cash down for it anyway, and it is a fair point, but it is still a generalization, and the fact remains that there will be some portion of its audience, no matter how major or minor, that will feel slighted unless it pays up. At the very least, all the weapons and classes are priced incredibly reasonably, so it’s clear that the developers aren’t trying to unfairly gouge you.

But don’t let my whining about what, as I’ve argued, is a necessary evil for all free to play games distract you from the crux of the matter, which is that Tribes: Ascend remains an incredibly fun game to play. From the extremely balanced out class based gameplay to its high octane, high speed shooting, from the gorgeous visuals to the return to what made Tribes so good in the first place, even some oddities such as the free to play design favoring paying players, or the complete lack of any single player mode or exposition (which might come as a bit of a shock to modern players, ironically enough) can be glanced over. If you’ve been bemoaning the stagnancy that pervades the FPS genre, now is the time to stop. Tribes: Ascend is the game that you have been waiting for.

This game was reviewed on the PC.