The idea is simple, it's basically a fishing rod, except instead of harmless fish you should be able to grab opponents and vehicles to prevent their escape or possibly tag along. There is a new weapon available in this new installment of Tribes, the grappler. There is something however that did seem odd to me, they might have potentially brought back an old issue where inventory stations had long lines you now have to walk up to the inventory station, activate it, select your items, and be on your way-if this will work I'm not sure. I got a chance to play it and the game does show promise of what a sequel to the original Tribes should be. The state of the game at E3 was pre-alpha and it looked pretty good, all the demo stations were networked together so it was a nice little LAN game. The inventory screen where you select your armor, packs and weapons has been enhanced over previous Tribes titles, so you can now see right away what your setup will look like, as well as giving you some minor descriptions. On top of that, you have a choice of "packs," most of which were not disclosed, with the exception of a "repair pack," which leads us to believe that you can function as a sort of engineer or medic. Each of these has its specific strengths and weaknesses, as heavy armor protects better but makes movements considerably slower, and vice versa.
To give Tribes Vengeance a little variety on the usual "class" selection for multiplayer games, Irrational Games lets you choose between three armor types (heavy, normal and small). This might be a case where the minimum requirements may be reasonable, although it may take an open beta to confirm it. The developer was confident however that it will be playable with a P4 1.3GHz and a geForce2 with 64MB of RAM with some of the settings turned down. The system that was demoing Tribes: Vengeance at E3 had a Radeon 9800TX and a P4 3Ghz processor, I caught this when the demo crashed on one of the demo terminals. The developer I spoke to said that Sierra doesn't want a repeat of Tribes 2 and that they will be doing an open beta. As a positive side effect, because the UT engine will be used map making tools will be readily available immediately after some tweaks to taylor it to the Tribes world. Since it now uses the Unreal Tournament graphics engine it shouldn't have the same problem that Tribes 2 had, just about all systems on the market at the time ran the game incredibly slow. While talking to one of the developers I was given some details on what Tribes: Vengeance holds in store for us. The story is set in the original StarSiege: Tribes universe, and although it is pretty linear in progress and outcome, it will allow you to follow several characters in different timelines (about 20 years apart). Tribes: Vengeance promises to change that but can it be held accountable? I think so.Īs most people know by now, Tribes: Vengeance will not only focus on multiplayer action in huge outdoor environments, but also sport a full-fledged story-driven single player campaign. Some Tribes fans remember the disaster that Tribes 2 was, it was simply released too soon without proper testing.
Tribes is famous for its unique multiplayer gameplay, having vast outdoor environments and bright colors compared to standard FPS games like Quake, it stood out among its class.
That same year, publisher Sierra shut down the developer. A few years later, 2001 to be exact, Dynamix put their not-so-finished touches on Tribes 2, which was received with mixed feelings, not due to it being a bad game, but mainly because of a bug-infested final product plagued by performance issues. Many to date still credit the original StarSiege: Tribes as the title that made the move from regular deathmatch online action into the more organized cooperative, or an early version of team-based gameplay. Back in 1998 (yes THAT long ago) a certain developer called Dynamix came into the market with StarSiege Tribes, which literally took the online community by storm.