Sierra Cancels Tribes Extreme

This afternoon, Tribes Extreme designer Nels Bruckner updated the official Tribes Extreme web site with word of the game's cancellation. Bruckner states that after a two weeks of evaluating the game's progress, the development team decided to stop production on Tribes Extreme and instead refocus its energies on Tribes 2.

Tribes Extreme was announced earlier this year, after the surprise success that Starseige: Tribes experienced. The game was supposed to infuse the multiplayer capabilities of Tribes with a branching single-player campaign.

"The single-player component has taken us much longer to wrap our heads around than we originally anticipated, and we just don't feel we have anything close to finished that would be worth charging for or releasing," explained Bruckner. "However, we've learned a ton of stuff during the development of Tribes Extreme, and we feel that we have an insanely cool plan for the single-player component in Tribes 2."

Tribes 2 is still heavily under development, but it is still scheduled for a mid-2000 release. Interestingly enough, Tribes 2 was supposed to be a multiplayer-only game, much like the original Tribes. With the cancellation of Tribes Extreme, it seems that a single-player component will now be incorporated into the sequel.