Hi-Rez Studios, who owns the wildly popular MOBA SMITE and the lesser-known shooter Tribes: Ascend, made a rather sudden development yesterday in the world of Tribes. The Alpharetta, Georgia-based developer released every single game in the long Tribes series as freeware on its website, including 1994’s Metaltech: Earthsiege.
The Tribes smorgasbord seems be intended to generate hype for Ascend’s aptly-named “Out of the Blue” update, which was suddenly announced earlier this September. The Out of the Blue update is the first update Ascend has seen for two years, with the previous patch dating to March 2013. Many fans of the game had felt that Hi-Rez had abandoned the series for good when they announced in 2013 that they would no longer be updating Ascend in favor of working on SMITE. But their fears were addressed in statement released in September by Hi-Rez president Stewart Chisam, who said that “None of [Hi-Rez] felt good about the state [Tribes] was left in.” The Out of the Blue update aims to rebalance the game and streamline its character customization by condensing its previous nine character classes into three (Light, Medium, and Heavy), and by removing the experience point gates and paywalls that restricted character unlocks. The rest of the patch notes can be found here.
Tribes: Ascend is the latest in a very long series of sci-fi first-person shooters that began with 1994’s Metaltech: Earthsiege, in itself a spinoff of Dynamix’s other series, Metaltech. Earthsiege eventually begat Starsiege: Tribes, with the owners of the franchise changing hands several times throughout the past decade. Hi-Rez Studios acquired the IP from InstantAction in 2010 and released Ascend in 2012. The series is renowned for its incredibly fast movement speed, projectile-based combat, high execution barriers, and in the case of Ascend, its gratuitous voice command spam.
Hi-Rez hasn’t announced a release date for the Tribes: Ascend reboot, but its public test servers are constantly being updated. You can find a download link for the beta in the opening post of this thread. Or if you want taste of classic PC gaming history, check out this under-appreciated series by downloading any of the Tribes games here.