The Tribes series is a line of first-person, multiplayer-centric action games, originally developed by Dynamix, which focus on team and class based combat in open landscapes. The first game, Starsiege: Tribes (1998), offered a unique experience in an era of tightly enclosed, corridor-based shooters, and capitalised on the early, explosive growth of online action games to become very successful. The follow up, Tribes 2 (2001), suffered a difficult birth, with a flurry of bugs, patches and patch-retractions. This lead to strongly negative word of mouth and publicity, which crippled the game’s fortunes, and those of Dynamix, which closed months after the game’s release.
The series was widely assumed to be finished at this point. However, in 2004, Irrational Games released Tribes: Vengeance, updating the multiplayer game, introducing a singleplayer campaign, and announcing that “Tribes [was] back with a vengeance.” Unfortunately, the return was short-lived. Despite good reviews, sales were disappointing and fewer than 6 months after release, the game’s publisher announced it was ceasing support for the title. As such, assessing the game’s multiplayer component is somewhat difficult (at any given time, there are barely a few dozen players spread thinly across a similar number of servers), and so these notes focus mainly on the singleplayer component. These notes assess Tribes: Vengeance’s game design, followed by its narrative. They then strive to determine which factors caused the game’s commercial demise.
As with previous Tribes games, the player is provided with a personal jetpack for the majority of their play time, which allows temporary flight through a recharging energy bar. This is a core, defining part of the gameplay. Players can also ’ski’ on flat surfaces and down slopes. Accessed with major buttons - right click and the spacebar - these two skills are critical to players, granting them much greater freedom and speed of movement than a typical shooter. The level design emphasises open spaces. Even interiors are built to a cavernous scale; furnishings are minimal and unobstructive.
Combined, these elements create a style of combat that is dynamic and strongly three-dimensional. It contrasts strongly with the more static, two-dimensional screenspace-based combat that many modern shooters have moved towards (as typified by Call of Duty 2). Instead, it’s refreshingly reminiscent of the Quake era of shooters (in which the original Tribes was born), with all the hopping, leaping, rocket-jumping and jump-pad riding that they entailed.
The game’s major weapons are similarly Quake-esque: The centrepiece is the ‘disc launcher’, essentially a rebadged rocket launcher. Chainguns, shotguns, sniper rifles and grenade launchers complete the bulk of the arsenal. In addition, Irrational has included a few more irregular weapons: A grappling hook is made largely redundant by the jetpack, and so only plays a cameo role in a few singleplayer levels. A handheld shield-cum-frisbee is fun to wield, but disappointingly weak. A “rocket pod” offers a steerable gaggle of rockets, best used against vehicles. Other items - speed packs, repair packs and booster packs - offer a player further options. Enemies are built using permutations of these weapons and tools, demonstrating the strength of the gameplay tools.
The level design perpetuates this old-school, 90s, very ‘game-y’ feel. The majority of the levels (a healthy mix of indoor and outdoor) are structured around following the green lights, running from one checkpoint to the next. Players shoot whatever stands in the way and occasionally press an ambiguously labelled switch in order to gain access to the next checkpoint. The AI of the enemies is similarly simple - they see you, they shoot you. When they die, they drop some health for you, so you are always ready for the next batch. A number of missions are evidently intended to introduce the multiplayer mode’s various elements, but these are similarly simple - the emphasis is on introduction, rather than gameplay built specifically around the toolset. For example, one sequence introduces a tank vehicle by tasking a player with driving it down a winding linear underground corridor, killing a few enemies scattered along its length. They get out of the tank at the end of the corridor and the level progresses elsewhere.
Its simplicity perhaps sounds a little weak on paper, but in play, it all comes together to form an effective whole. The pace is fast. The jetpack and skiing make a player feel powerful. Unlike many of Irrational’s other games, the learning curve is gentle and never feels overwhelming. The weapons feel satisfying to use. This is a notable feat, given the wide open spaces mean what would normally be hitscan weapons (e.g. the shotgun) must be projectile-based instead, lest the combat descend into a frustrating potshot-oriented, long-range, low-damage affair.
This simplicity bleeds through to the narrative side of the game, and regrettably this is where it hurts the game. The overall plot is a fairly interesting affair, revolving around rival families and factions, though it is a little obfuscated by the frequent jumps between time periods and player-controlled characters. Beyond this, however, the game’s fiction is best described as cartoonish and at worst, generic.
The ‘families’ of the story are just the blue team, the yellow team and the red team. Blue becomes royalty, red becomes a Nazi-derived villain and yellow becomes the misunderstood outcasts. Opportunities to flesh out the personality of the gameworld are repeatedly missed: Armour is named simply “light”, “medium” and “heavy”. Enemies shout “I’m gonna kill you”, “You’re dead“, “Eat this!” and other clichés during combat (as well as, confusingly for a singleplayer game, “Kill them all“). Player death is met with radio messages like “Daniel, come in. Daniel!” Although each family’s environment cleverly plays on a different architectural theme, even this is cartoonish: The themes revolve around simple primitive shapes - pyramids for the red team, spheres and cylinders for the yellow team and boxes for the blues.
The primary vehicle for the game’s storytelling is dialogue - cutscenes with talking heads, radio banter between the player’s character and others, or overheard dialogue ‘offstage’ (through windows, grates, etc). Again, cartoonish and a lack of personality are the overriding themes. “Ready brother? Let’s do this.” “Activate the recalibration system in each comm tower.” Characterisation is often pushed out in favour of heavy exposition. It feels unnecessary and targeted towards long-term fans. While there is some rudimentary facial animation and acting, the cutscenes seem to lack confidence in its expressive capabilities. This leaves the dialogue bloated and the cutscenes’ pace suffers as a consequence.
It’s difficult to know where this weakness has come from. Irrational’s other games all sparkle with personality and sharp, memorable dialogue. Perhaps there was a belief that character and gameworld are of little importance to a multiplayer game. The recent rebirth of Team Fortress 2 proves this belief very wrong. Or perhaps it was conservatism and faithfulness to what had come before - the game’s universe is nine games old, stretching back to 1994. It seems strange to be so loyal to precedent when attempting to reboot a franchise.
Whatever the reason for sticking with such a cartoonish style, it is what I consider to be the fatal error that lead to the game’s commercial failure. Mainstream tastes have moved away from cartoonish fictions, in favour of more realistic depictions. Witness the move from Batman & Robin to Batman Begins, from Die Another Day to Casino Royale. Multiplayer shooters have made a similar shift, from Quake and Unreal in the 90s, to Counter-Strike and Battlefield today. Halo’s success stands out as an obvious counter-point to a simple shift from sci-fi settings, but the world it presents is much closer to realistic than cartoon.
The game’s box cover shouts its lack of personality. Where other action games’ boxes emphasise faces in close-up, Tribes: Vengeance chooses small, helmeted figures. The image is difficult to discern on a shelf (I initially thought it was a futuristic tank on the cover) and closer inspection does little to dismiss the impression that the game is simply generic sci-fi. The appeal of cartoonish, faceless space marines is niche. It’s a tired genre which seems to me to be of limited interest to a majority of buyers.
A major factor in any online multiplayer game’s success is its word of mouth and initial momentum. The size of a game’s player base has a significant bearing on an individual’s ability to get value for money from their purchase. Multiplayer is no fun if there’s no one to play against.The Vengance box seems very confident of its name’s reputation, shrinking the picture in favour of putting the name on a plain background. Unfortunately, ‘hardcore’ gamers - those most likely to be able to enjoy or look beyond the game’s fiction - are also most likely to have been aware of Tribes 2’s poor word of mouth reception. This makes them likely to have taken a “wait and see” approach to the game, to determine whether Vengeance would turn out similarly. By waiting, though, these potential buyers then inadvertently determined the game’s fate.
Overall, Tribes: Vengeance’s singleplayer campaign presents a return to an old-school shooter experience. Simple level design, familiar weaponry and the unique jetpack mechanic combine to create fast, kinetic combat. Its game design is well executed, accessible and superficially fun to play, but its narrative and fiction fails to engage and excite. It’s dangerous to argue with generalisations about the actions of others, but I feel that two factors conspired against its commercial success: Casual buyers were turned off by the generic setting and the remaining buyers were turned off by the series’ negative history.
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