
Hi-Rez Studios has quietly announced that the company has begun development on a sequel to Global Agenda. Currently title Global Agenda 2, the revelation came in a candid and honest post from the CEO and Janitorial Services of Hi-Rez Studios, Erez Goren.
In this announcement Goren discusses the problems that Global Agenda had/has and what the company has learned from its development. Knowledge that was successfully applied to Tribes: Ascend, although with its high skill ceiling it has become a niche game.
After sending out surveys and receiving overwhelming responses from players on what they want to see improved and how they would want to see it released, Hi-Rez decided to make Global Agenda 2 more PvP orientated. They are going to use a lot of the assets from Global Agenda while adding new maps, game modes and class weapons.
Hi-Rez expects Global Agenda 2, or whatever it may be called, to head to beta somewhere in the middle of 2013.
Full announcement after the cut.
As most of you know, GA has not received updates in a long time and the player base has significantly dwindled (probably an understatement).
After the release, we did expansions and added content frequently but the population still dropped and with it the revenue needed to keep adding more to the game.
Even though GA was not financially successful, we did learn a lot and tried to apply that knowledge to our new projects.
GA had/has a variety of issues but the biggest is that we tried to do too many things with it and no single mode was as good as it could be. We always said it was like a few games in one (PvP, AvA, Open Zones, Raids, Co-Op PvE)
We also learned a lot about developing content, performance optimization, balancing, patching, bots & cheats, f2p revenue models and more.
Tribes was our next effort, a much more focused game that got great reviews but requires such a high level of skill to play that makes it a very niche game. With Tribes we developed our PvP platform further which incorporates many important features including optimization for lower spec machines, anti-cheat detection, improved UI, server balancing, better patching, spectating, and much more.
The platform that started on GA evolved further with Tribes and with Smite which is currently in Beta.
So what does that mean for GA?
Several months ago we sent out Surveys and got responses about what players would like to see improved most in GA and how it should be released.
The majority of the responses were to release a new version of GA ‘GA2’ with a PvP focus and make that as good as possible.
So we are currently in the process of making that game. We will use a lot of the GA assets, some of the maps, and some of the game modes. We plan to add new maps, game modes, class weapons, and build it all on our newest platform.
We expect to start Beta testing GA2 (or whatever we end up calling it) by the middle of next year.