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Yet another studio take a crack at Tribes, kinda
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Prophecy Games
The fast-paced flag-capturing FPS series Tribes will return from the dead once again next week with the early access launch of Tribes 3: Rivals. Over the weekend, developers Prophecy Games announced March 12th is the date, with the full launch to follow after up to a year. Prophecy are spun off from Hi-Rez Studios, the folks who who made Tribes: Ascend, which officially shut down a few years back. I hear this next one's pretty fun.
TRIBES 3: Rivals - Early Access Announcement Trailer
The core of Tribes is capture-the-flag on giant maps, which players whizz about using jetpacks and a movement trick known as 'skiing'. Combine this with some projectile weaponry where you need to lead your shots and you have lots of opportunities for satisfying high-skill plays. Resident RPS Tribesman James enjoyed a Tribes 3 alpha playtest last year, with some reservations, then came away more enthusiastic after seeing changes made for its Steam Next Fest demo in February.
Tribes 3: Rivals is due to enter early access on Steam on the 12th of March, 2024. While Ascend was free-to-play, Rivals will cost cash (and sell cosmetics too), with a launch discount set to temporarily bring the price down from $20 to $18. The plan is for the early access phase to last between six months and one year while Prophecy Games add, tweak, and optimise bits.
The devs say it may come to the Epic Games Store later (which I imagine could have been requested by as many as three people). They say it might also hit PlayStations and Xboxen at some point, potentially supporting cross-platform play.
Tribes 3 developers Prophecy Games started as part of Hi-Rez Studios, and have said they include "a lot of the core team" from Ascend, then "spun off from Hi-Rez as a fully independent studio" in early 2020. Prophecy previously released the battle royale-ish Starsiege: Raiders and extraction shooter Starsiege: Deadzone, both set in the world of Tribes. Raiders never made it past the playtesting phase while Deadzone did get an early access launch in July 2023. In February 2024, Prophecy "temporarily" pulled Deadzone from store shelves while saying they would keep servers running. I believe the plan is—or, at one point, was—to have Tribes, Raiders, and Deadzone as three modes within the same game, though their Tribes 3 listings and FAQs don't say anything about that now. All this doesn't inspire confidence, but I do trust James when he says the murder is good. And it wouldn't truly be Tribes if the whole situation didn't feel faintly ominous, would it?
The rights to Tribes have changed hands several times across the years, giving many different studios a crack at making one since Dynamix released the original Starsiege: Tribes in 1998. Several non-'Tribes' Tribes games have come over the years too, including Fallen Empire: Legions and Midair, both of which were followed by spiritual successors of their own from yet more different studios. The next of these will be Midair 2, which is currently running a playtest you can join on Steam. While Tribes 'em ups rarely seem to be smash hits, enough people want Tribes to exist that there's always someone trying. Turns out, there's something very appealing about the idea of high-speed, high-flying, high-skillcap multiplayer murders.
