After the leak of gameplay video from GarageGames's unnamed Tribes like shooter was released, GarageGames' Tim Aste gave FiringSquad a a little more info about the game which will be part of their upcoming Instant Action web based game service:
What was accidentally leaked were videos sent around on Thursday demoing to management depts. here who were inquiring to my team about new bits added to the game in the past week we were talking about in an earlier meeting. We then sent these videos over to the graphics department of the Instant Action team, as they were putting together some media for an update to the instantaction.com media site.
At some point the vids were uploaded along with several other games, but an htaccess slip made them publicly viewable. They have been since removed, they were originally intended for the team to capture 2-3 shots for promotional material that was to be available post-holidays, and we had to send it to them before we all left on break.
The game is unannounced officially and un-named as of the moment, but will be a freedom of movement team based action FPS on InstantAction.com, and is being developed by a very talented team here at the newly formed GG Studios division.
As for the "game in a browser" stuff, my opinion for this project and in all is the game should come first. The team and myself are all hardcore FPS players. We won't sacrifice anything that would feel bad. The first thing we actually decided as a team was that we want to bring back the feelings we had as gamers in ~1997, simple, but not overly simple, deep mechanics but not too complex.
We want it to be like the era of Quakeworld again. Most of our fondest memories are of the quakeworld/tribes era, how cool and fun it was, and how it was not a huge investment of time and complexity, easy to get into and play but hard to master.
We don't want to worry about huge complex rules or time investments, but we want deep gameplay and we want the game just makes sense and feel good (especially the freedom of movement and team interaction). We want the out of the box experience and style to rock, and not feel mass marketed.
That's where the browser based platform InstantAction has really shines. The coolest part of the IA stuff is it's like taking a digital platform like you see in many popular "digital download services" today, and taking the ease of use aspects of a site like YouTube and wrapping them all into a single spot. That means game stats and stuff talk back to the server, games and "parties" carry through different servers, it's easy to launch and share games without a heavy application running int he background, and tie in all kinds of cool community aspects like clans, "awards", etc in the mix that follow you through servers, and games.
As developers, it's allows us direct access to our audience which is super awesome as well, we can push out updates easy to servers and clients, and continually add fixes and content, all without 10 different bloated patches for 10 different games. I'd never sacrifice the important parts of PC gaming on a project I'd work on, neither would my team, so we are all really excited about what the browser stuff actually offers us.
As for the game, this leak has slightly forced our hand to revealing our cards early. We hope to have more to show next month, or maybe after the holidays. The team and I have been fairly disappointed with a lot of FPS multiplayer titles lately (some have rocked, but not most).
At our core we want to make something that is just fun for us to play. The cool factor about our arrangement with IAC this spring was they basically gave us a sandbox to create what's cool, so we can set our own guidelines and factors, no publisher or marketing interference.
The game has only been in development since the end of October, but the studio / company has flirted with the idea for quite some time (as you probably remember from around March 06). This time we are for real, we have the means and motivation, and hopefully we can find a way to bring that whole PC multiplayer gaming experience we miss back in some form to the people who miss it, and maybe introduce it to many more.