Following Hi-Res studios’ surge of success with Tribes: Ascend many got their first piece of combat action with the company unknown to them that the team still had an MMO slowly dying from the years before. Global Agenda released back in 2010 following relentless testing as a retail subscription based MMO. Shortly after its first major update the game’s dwindling player-base caused the switch to a single retail transaction to play the game, and shortly after a full emphasis on F2P.

Shortly after the F2P switch was flicked, Hi-Res announced that revenue had never been higher, but log on to the game right now and you’ll quickly notice all is not well. The lack of patches – and lack of players – meant Hi-Res Studio’s efforts to create a hybrid MMO was not a financially stable one. And with that, after many questions of “When are we getting a patch”, CEO, Erez Goren has released the below statement to officially announce “Global Agenda 2“.

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.

- Erez Goren, C.E.O. & Janitorial Services, Hi-Rez Studios