Tribes series
For the biological concept, see tribe (biology). For the social concept, see tribe.Tribes is a series of
science fiction first-person shooter computer games originally published by
Dynamix, a subsidiary of
Sierra Entertainment. Set in the same universe as the game
Starsiege, there are four games in the Tribes series:
*
Starsiege: Tribes, released for
Microsoft Windows on
November 30,
1998*
Tribes 2, released for Windows on
March 28,
2001*
Tribes Aerial Assault, released for
PlayStation 2 on
September 23,
2002*
Tribes: Vengeance, released for
Microsoft Windows in October
2004Starsiege: Tribes was one of the first first-person shooters meant to be played exclusively against other human players across computer networks, either on a
LAN or over the
Internet. Its only solo play consisted of a few training missions. It was also one of the first first person shooters to feature vehicles as a major gameplay element, and it was known for its very large outdoor levels.
Because of its online play and vast terrain,
Tribes requires strategy, coordination, and teamwork among players. "Lone cowboys" are less of a factor in victories here than in other first-person shooters.
Several notable features distinguish the Tribes games from other first-person shooters:
* Battles primarily take place outdoors amid hills and valleys which can constitute a vast area. The terrain is actually mapped to a virtual sphere far too large to be traversed during a game, though the landscape can be seen to repeat itself if a player explores far enough in a single direction. Some worlds are lush and green with lakes; some are frozen and snowy; others are black and charred with lava pools.
* All players are equipped with jetpacks, allowing limited short-duration flight and requiring vertical attacks and defense. Jetpacks are powered by the player's armor; the armor recharges its energy at a slower rate than the jetpack uses it, requiring some recharge time between uses. The practice of leaping down a slope to pick up speed then jetpacking up the next slope is known as
skiing, and can allow even a heavily-armored player to move rapidly across the terrain. (The idea of jetpacks in this game may have been derived from the book
Starship Troopers.) While some considered skiing to be a bug it was in fact a simple, though unexpected, byproduct of the physics engine. When a player lands while moving forward at a high speed they skid a short distance. If they jump into the air just as they hit, they can limit the effect of friction on their movement, and "ski" down a hill. Skiing has become an intrinsic element of the Tribes series due to its popularity.
* The Tribes games emphasize, and even require, teamwork and strategy. Games can involve two teams of sixteen players each. Instead of attacking the enemy directly, a player can decide to erect defenses such as turret emplacements and sensor networks, and can repair them when they become damaged. A player can also attack the enemy's resources, for example by destroying power generators so as to cripple the enemy's ability to resupply. Someone can earn a great deal of points, and serve a useful purpose in helping his team to victory, without ever having seen or fought the enemy.
* Several different kinds of land and air vehicles play an important role in the games. Transports allow someone to fly heavily-armed teammates into enemy territory. Mobile point bases are heavily armored large trucks which provide sensors, a rearming station, and a missile turret wherever they are deployed. Fighter craft, bombers, tanks, and all-terrain vehicles are also included in the games.
* At a resupply station, a player can choose between three kinds of armor: light armor can move and fly quickly, heavy armor is slow and can take a lot of hits and can carry larger resupplies such as missile turret refits, and medium armor is a tradeoff between the two. A player can further prepare for a specific role in the game through his choice of backpack: a repair pack allows him to repair damaged teammates and equipment, an energy pack allows longer flight and can power the sniper rifle, a cloak pack provides limited invisibility, a jammer pack shields him from enemy sensors and turrets, and so forth.
* There are several game variants available in addition to the conventional
capture the flag. "Siege" puts one side in charge of defending a switch and the other side's goal is to touch it; if successful, the teams switch sides to see if the other team can reach it quicker. "Rabbit" places one flag on the field, and the first person to pick it up becomes the rabbit and is hunted by everyone else; upon dying he drops the flag for someone else to pick up and be hunted, and when the round is over the person who has carried the flag the longest is the winner.
* A detailed set of
voice bindings allowed players to send vocal commands or information to each other by pressing short sequences of keys. The sound clips used were pre-recorded, and each player could choose from several different kinds of voices for his character.
* Any player can initiate a vote to boot another player off (for example, if someone is a teamkiller) or to start a new game on a different map.
* The Windows versions of the games feature a detailed scripting language, allowing for a wide range of customizations and
mods.
Weapons in the games include conventional blasters, chainguns, sniper rifles, and grenades. Also available are mines, disc launchers (here called "spinfusors", their projectiles follow a straight trajectory and can be deadly when used by a skilled player in motion through the air), and mortar cannons (whose projectiles can hit targets hundreds of meters away). A targeting
laser itself does no damage, but can be used to "paint" a target and provide teammates with an aiming reticle at which to fire; this is especially useful in letting teammates use mortars and missiles to hit targets even on the other side of a mountain ridge.
Starsiege: Tribes still retains a large community of players. It pioneered many elements ubiquitous in many multiplayer first person shooters today (e.g.
Unreal Tournament 2004,
Battlefield 1942 etc.). It is available as a free download from Sierra's web site. [
1] (The downloadable version is lacking the v1.11 patch which can be found at FilePlanet, though registration is required to obtain it. [
2] The game can also be updated with the unofficial "1.30 LastHope" patch, which will make it fully compatible with all v1.11 servers in addition to "LastHope" servers. [
3])
Starsiege: Tribes sold a total of 210,000 copies, but due to it's small size and complete lack of copy protection was frequently copied and distributed over the Internet. Actual users at the peak of popularity were over one million users.
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 game play 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. The message boards were eventually removed by a patch when they came to require too much effort to maintain against objectionable content.
Tribes 2 sold a total of 400,000 copies. [
4]
A
Mac port of
Tribes 2 was almost completed, but scrapped before release.
The graphic engine used in
Tribes 2 was named the
Torque Game Engine and is available for licensing through
GarageGames for fees starting at
US$100.
Tribes Aerial Assault was a
PlayStation 2 version of
Tribes 2. Developed by
Inevitable Entertainment and published by Sierra, it offered simplified but significantly faster game play (fewer maps and vehicles, and a subset of the original's voice commands) and network support for up to sixteen players at a time.
A PC packaging of Tribes Aerial Assault named
Tribes: Fast Attack was designed but not released.
A PC & Console RTS named
Tribes: Commander was designed but never given a green light for full development. It used the idea of the commander position from
Starsiege: Tribes game and merged tradition Tribes game play , RTS game play, and ideas from console sports games to create a squad level RTS with very fast action. The player acted as the squad commander, giving high level orders to troops which used strong AI to implement those commands.
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 game play that was typical of
Tribes 2 in favor of the faster 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 befor 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 of 2005, all support for
Tribes: Vengeance was dropped, including a planned patch that would have addressed several bugs and added
PunkBuster support. The game's weak performance leaves the future of the series in question.
March 2006 has seen gossip rife across the net as
GarageGames "leaks" short videos of a tech demo which features "tribes like" game play on their new
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.
There were a few organizations which sponsored organized competition, usually in the form of a
Ladder. The competition started immediately after the release of the game and continues today.
The Online Gaming League (OGL)This was the first ladder sponsoring a pure Tribes
CTF ladder. The ladder had many iterations of Tribes gameplay, including the CTF ladder, the popular Arena ladder, and ladders for other game modes. Initially just a competition ladder, it also was the genesis of the Tribes community forum. In late 1999, OGL programmer and forum administrator Razorback angered many forum participants with excessive editing and a language filter. This move spawned the mass exodus from this forum to the
TribalWar forum.
TeamPlay.NetTeamplay was the "other" ladder for Tribes gameplay. Using an interesting point-value ranking based on the number of "planets" currently in that team's possession, the ladder mixed game modes (CTF, Defend and Destroy, etc.) for an exciting, but ultimately unsuccessul, mode of play.
Tribes World League (TWL)This alternate ladder for Tribes play evolved as OGL interest died down. Now called
TeamWarfare League, TWL was the home of popular Tribes 1 and Tribes 2 competition through the life of the game.
Many LAN parties involving the
Tribes community took place while
Tribes was popular. These were all user-created and company-sponsored events.
TribesConTribesCon was a west-coast based LAN party for Tribes fans which was well attended by Tribes people. It got started in 1999 and ran through four iterations until 2003, its final year. Attendance peaked in 2002 at about 250 people.
TribesCampOrganized and sponsored by a particularly unliked member of the Tribes community, this one-year event took place in St. Louis and was poorly attended.
TribesGala 2000Marketed as a LAN party, and manifesting as a press circus, this one-time LAN party was popularized by the presence of many community personalities and the attendance of the Tribes 2 development team. One notable event was an individual disconnecting and running off with one of the demo systems for the then-unfinished Tribes 2 game. The system was recovered and the thief caught.
UVALANUndisputably the most successful of the Tribes LAN parties, this is the primary gathering for the Tribes community. Beginning in February 2000, this event is held annually in Chantilly, Virginia, every summer. The event started at the Doubletree hotel in Charlottesville - the site of the first two events in 2000 - but due to rapid growth in attendance, moved to the more centrally located and larger venue of the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly. The series of events will come to a close in August 2006 with UVALAN 8.
Tribal WarsDuring the marketing push for the Tribes:Vengeance game, the UVALAN organizers put aside the UVALAN name for one year and held Tribal Wars 2004. The event replaced both UVALAN and TribesCon, the two largest LAN parties for Tribes players and
Tribalwar denizens, and was attended by over 500 people split between an East Coast (Chantilly, VA) location and a West Coast (Los Angeles, CA) location. The event was a "who's-who" of both the competitive Tribes community and the
Tribalwar forum.
*
Project Last Hope (
Current version: 1.30) An unofficial, fully compatible, anti-cheat patch.
*
Bittah Australian and New Zealand Tribes Community site
*
Tribes 2 official web site*
Tribes: Vengeance official web site*
TopGuns Gaming Tribes community site. Hosts administrated "family friendly" server, server rentals, and has developed its own mod (Shifter-TG)
*
TribalWar Community web site
*
TROC Community web site
*
Planet Tribes Community web site
*
TribesRoleplayers Tribes Universe History site
*
GamerPlug Tribes:AA community
* [
5] Link to a download of Tribes
*
Tribal-Gaming Tribes community site.
