Starsiege: Tribes

About Starsiege: Tribes

Starsiege: Tribes (1998) is Dynamix's squad-based online shooter of jetpacks, vast outdoor maps and capture the flag, whose accidental "skiing" exploit became a defining technique and which won the AIAS online game of the year.

Starsiege: Tribes in Depth

In the 40th century, humanity has spread across the galaxies through jumpgates, and factions fight for territory: the Children of the Phoenix, descended from people cut off from the Great Human Empire, the imperial knights of the Blood Eagle, and the lesser Diamond Sword and Starwolf, among countless splinter tribes. Players fight for one of the four major tribes across 40 levels, mostly outdoor environments in weather from sunshine to hail that stretch for several in-game kilometres, with bases scattered across them. Modes are capture the flag, run on 75 percent of servers, deathmatch, capture and hold, defend and destroy, the second most popular, and find and retrieve.

Light, medium and heavy armour determine armour, energy, ammunition and which weapons and equipment can be used, so only heavy armour carries the mortar and only light the sniper rifle. Inventory stations supply armour, vehicles, eight weapons and packs, and bases include generators, whose destruction shuts down turrets and stations, as well as sensors. Every player has a jetpack drawing on an energy cell, used for flight and evasive hops. By tapping jump with the right timing while descending a slope, players could "ski", building momentum to cross maps at high speed, an exploit of the physics that Dynamix made a proper feature in Tribes 2.

Making Starsiege: Tribes

Dynamix developed Starsiege: Tribes and Sierra On-Line published it in 1998. It received favourable reviews: GameSpot found an almost perfect balance between gameplay, online connectivity and speedy performance, praising its seamless indoor-outdoor maps while noting weak training and queues at weapon consoles, and later named it among the greatest games of all time; Next Generation said it had "the design and the technology to be the next standard in Internet action gaming". It won the AIAS's Online Action/Strategy Game of the Year, losing PC Action Game and Computer Entertainment Title of the Year to Half-Life, as well as Online Game of the Year from Computer Games Strategy Plus and IGN. PC Gamer US gave it its 1999 Special Achievement in Innovation, saying "Tribes re-wrote the rules of online combat" with "airtight networking code". Tribes 2 followed in March 2001 and Irrational Games' Tribes: Vengeance in 2004.