Tribes (series) - Versions

Versions

Starsiege: Tribes was released in November of 1998, and sold a total of 210,000 copies.

A single player version called Tribes Extreme began development shortly after the release of Starsiege: Tribes, but was abandoned before completion .

Tribes 2 added additional vehicles (such as a two-person tank and a three-person bomber with a belly turret), weapons, and items. A few details of gameplay were changed; for instance, the original game made a player choose his load out while he was at a supply station (sometimes resulting in long lines to use the station), while the sequel required the player to choose his load out before he used the station. Tribes 2 also included many features to help its community of players: it included user profiles, interactive chat areas, and message boards. The initial release of Tribes 2 was plagued by bugs and slow performance; several patches were released over the following year (first by Sierra, later by GarageGames) to address these issues.

Tribes Aerial Assault was a PlayStation 2 version of Tribes 2. Developed by Inevitable Entertainment and published by Sierra, it offered simplified but significantly swifter gameplay (fewer maps and vehicles, and a subset of the original's voice commands) and network support for up to sixteen players at a time.

Tribes: Vengeance was a prequel to the other games. In addition to multiplayer support, it featured a full single-player game with a storyline. It was developed by Irrational Games using a heavily modified Unreal engine to bring the game's appearance up to par with other modern first-person shooters. This new Tribes largely de-emphasized the focus on massive maps and slower gameplay that was typical of Tribes 2 in favor of the swifter action of the original Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes Aerial Assault. Battles were faster paced, and teamwork and vehicles were less necessary. Tribes: Vengeance was released with almost no marketing support in autumn 2004 shortly after the release of Doom 3 and Far Cry and just before the releases of Half-Life 2 and Halo 2. Sales were predictably poor: after six months, only 47,000 copies of the game had been sold. In March 2005, all support for Tribes: Vengeance was dropped, including a planned patch that would have addressed several bugs and added PunkBuster support.

In February 2006, GarageGames "leaked" short videos of a tech demo which featured "tribes like" game play on their Torque Shader Engine or TSE. The demo made its debut at the 2006 GDC as "Legions", an obvious allusion to the Tribes series for which the team is famous for. Announced officially in 2007 as a "spiritual successor" to Tribes, Fallen Empire: Legions was released to the public in June 2008 on InstantAction, and is currently being developed by the community after InstantAction was shut down in November 2010.

In March 2009, GarageGames announced it had obtained the rights to the Tribes franchise from Activision Blizzard and would be bringing Starsiege: Tribes to InstantAction as PlayTribes. However on November 11, 2010, InstantAction was shut down, thus cancelling development on PlayTribes. A leaked build of PlayTribes was released in March of 2010.

On October 23, 2010, Hi-Rez Studios announced that they were the new owners of the Tribes franchise, and were developing a new Tribes MMO called Tribes Universe.

Hi-Rez Studios attended PAX East 2011 and announced Tribes: Ascend, a multiplayer-only successor to Tribes 2 for the PC. The game was released on April 12, 2012.