General: Tribes MMO Announced

Stradden

Hi-Rez Studios, the team behind the MMOFPS Global Agenda, have announced that they have acquired the FPS IP Tribes and plan to create an MMO in that universe called, Tribes Universe. In an interview with Gamasutra, the company revealed that their new MMO will accomodate much larger battles that the small scale conflicts currently available through Global Agenda.

Global Agenda, though, was was designed around 10 vs 10 team play, not Tribes-style large scale battles. As the game switched to a subscription-free model in June, Hi-Rez experimented with adding larger warzones but found there was "no practical path" for scaling the game up significantly.



"We can’t transform Global Agenda to a large scale battle format, but since we liked this concept a lot, we decided to create a new game based on large scale fighting," said Hi-Rez CEO Erez Goren in a forum posting (registration required). "In order to develop the new game many significant steps had to be taken."



Those steps included combat alterations, "a significant rewrite to the unreal engine servers to allow for 100+ players to be fighting in the same map, a new UI system that is more efficient, a different implementation of character visuals, a new terrain system, etc."

Check out the Gamasutra article, here.