So I hear ET:QW has skiing ala Tribes?

(poisonspider) #1

Is it true that enemy territory quake wars you can ski when using a Strogg jetpack?

Which member of the development team is responsible for this, who is the Tribes fan?

I hear the skiing is like tribes vengeance though (which is bad).

I am the biggest tribes 1 fan ever. I wish to mod this, but I don’t think it would be the proper base or engine to do it with. The jetpack and physics have to feel reminiscent of Tribes 1 to be a hit. And I don’t know how large the maps are, but I have heard that one of them is 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer and that does not sound big enough.

I had previously written up a document for a new Tribes game and already have a name for the mod as well.

(Ragnar_40k) #2

http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=15211

(Wils) #3

There are (or were) three Tribes players at SD - me and Marauder (who’s since left to go back to Germany), who both played for idk? in Europe, and Fearog, who played Tribes 1 in Australia. Several other people at the company have played it sporadically, but not to the extent of joining a clan.

You can make maps bigger than 1km square, but it sounds like you want a carbon copy of Tribes 1, and I can tell you now you aren’t going to get that without a lot of work. Getting something as good as, and similar to an existing game is relatively straightforward - exactly reproducing the feel is, well, not.

I’m sort of hoping that people are willing to move on from Tribes 1 by now. I completely understand that the game has to be good, which I don’t think Tribes 2 base or T:V were. Did you enjoy Classic mod, or refuse to play it?

(poisonspider) #4

damnit i made a post but wasn’t signed in. So here I go again.

I was a Shifter player, but not the new shifter. I played an old version of shifter which was a much better version with more useful items and less randomness. I wish I was a game developer. My goal was to create a game based off that, make refinements. It is definatly something I will never stop thinking about or forget at least until somebody makes and good first person shooter with jetpacks and skiing, it just fun to me and its sort of a dream of mine that I have had for a long time, kinda passionate about it, even if nothing does ever happen, its nice to dream.

I was hardcore playing tribes for minimum of 4 hours a day back then. I didnt play Tribes 2 for that long, I think I got out before they made any major patches (hey that was a messed up start to a game!) and Tribes Vengeance yeah well I played it for a week. Anyways thanks for your reply.

(poisonspider) #5

thanks for the link ragnar_40k but i found it like 2 minutes before you posed it at my palace www.tribalwar.com :smiley:

(JamieL) #6

Why is there so much hate’in on my peoples? :frowning: Tribes Vengeance was made in Australia, and I think they did a pretty decent job with single player and artwork and all that.

But I think they were so concerned with pleasing the tiny hardcore Tribes audience and stroked their every minute request and suggestions that whatever they’d make would never have pleased the hardcore tribes player anyway (who just want a shiny looking Tribes 1, to be honest) and alienated the rest of us normal FPS fans. So in the end, they sold about 40,000 copies and no one was happy with the game and Universal dropped support for it so fast like it was a terminal disease.

I think there’s a lesson to be learnt there. Don’t alienate the rest of the general gaming base to cater to a tiny hardcore hard-to-please audience.

(poisonspider) #7

Oh yah this is funny,

what caught my initial attention from quake wars was the aircraft. When you enter and vehicle the cockpit actually functions, this was a gameplay design I was hoping to put into my game; for instance when using the bomber aircraft, you may actually need to use the cockpit to locate and destroy your targets. Anyways I was planning on calling it Strife: something.

(FeaRog) #8

Hey, I was also a big Shifter player :slight_smile:

As Wils says, making a game feel exactly like Tribes 1 would be a very, very difficult task. However, making a game that takes elements of the Tribes series but is awesome in its own right is very very possible! This is what I’m hoping for.

As I said in my other post, the skiing is very moddable. Its in the game DLL, so anyone with a compiler capable of building the game will be able to tinker with it. My original implementation of the skiing was more like T1, but this game isn’t designed for Tribes fans only so it had to be easier to use. It should be entirely possible to mod it into a very T1-esque feel.

(Hansel) #9

Not everyone hated T:V, in fact the singleplayer game of T:V was better than HL2 I think. :slight_smile:

And Irrational really did a good job with the T:V, making Tribes with Unreal 1.5(?) engine is not an easy task.

But the expectations of Tribes players were too high, and it was impossible to please them all with a unfinished MP game, without no support from publisher. Also the marketing of the game was nonexistent, which also kept player numbers low. A Tribes game that did emphasize Singleplayer over Multiplayer was doomed to fai.

And in the end, T:V was lacking many of the things that made T1 and T2 so popular. But for me it was still better game than Battlefield 2, that I played two weeks, and I haven’t really touched any FPS game ever since.

(SCDS_reyalP) #10

There is a repeating theme here… The hardcore player base of game X (be it q3, qwtf, RTCW, tribes) want a new game that essentially duplicates their old favorite game, but brings in a load of new players. Or to put it another way, they don’t really want a NEW game at all, they just want their old one revived by new graphics and marketing.

For a developer, this isn’t very attractive. Re-creating something isn’t usually fun as making something new, and the press and general public are likely to criticize them for doing an uncreative re-hash. Even if they accept that, chances are that the hardcore player base still won’t be pleased because the end result isn’t exactly the same. Finally, a major factor in the huge success of a game like tribes or Q3 was that, in addition to being great games, they were NEW. Re-creating the game with better graphics doesn’t give you this, so the chances of the game being a big success are rather small.

Me ramble ? NEVAR! :moo:

(kamikazee) #11

Wils said something along of your post, like “you can make something as good but you can never make it the same”. From the looks of it, ET:QW is ET:QW.

I ask for a fun (afterwards) moddable game. If I can use my gathered skills to play it, that’s a plus.

(JamieL) #12

The same thing has happened to Quake 4 multiplayer. No one is playing it. It’s not even listed in the top 40 on Gamespy stats ( http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/ ).

Why? Because it was made to please the small amount of hardcore players of Quake 3. Unfortunately, they’re still happy with Quake 3, and the general FPS gamer has moved on from Quake 3 death match.

(Rhoades) #13

That’s pretty much exactly what happened to DoD:S. The Hardcorers wanted an exact duplicate of DoD but with better graphics. Some things were changed and everyone had a hissy fit, but the game is going pretty strong right now.

(Got Haggis?) #14

Tribes Vengeance was a good game. It really was. Especially the single player. But, it came out at a bad time. Same time as Half Life 2 and World of Warcraft. And the marketing job for it was less than stellar. The brand manager of Tribes, who happened to be a huge fan of the series, got laid off shortly before the product shipped, not helping things. Same thing happened to the producer (actually they offerred to relocate his job to LA, but he didn’t want to move). The box art was TERRIBLE. Then, after a few short months, they pulled all support from the game, even cancelling a patch that they had talked about that added things like punkbuster support. After 6 months, it had only sold 47,000 copies…which in this industry, is nothing.

I would love to see a mod come out for ET:QW that is Tribes-like in nature…but not an exact copy of any of the 3 games (for the record, I was one of the few people that loved all 3 games…started off with tribes 1 back in 1998…addicted…tribes 2 came out…well…crappy launch, kept waiting for patches…finally they fixed it with classic mod…and tribes vengeance i thought was decent).

Anyway, I am going to do anything I can do help get a tribes-inspired mod off the ground.