The original Starsiege: Tribes from 1998 helped conclusively prove that there's more to first-person shooters than just straightforward deathmatch games in which you run round and blast everything that isn't you. The futuristic game let you choose one of three character types wearing a high-tech suit of light, medium, or heavy armor and face off against an opposing team of similarly equipped players on huge, open landscapes on various alien planets. The game went on to become a cult hit, and it has a small but fiercely loyal following to this day. Its sequel, Tribes 2, was released in 2001, and the game's enthusiastic fan community created a short-lived sensation on the Internet that involved a Macromedia Flash movie and an old 16-bit console game. However, the fans were much less appreciative of the technical problems that plagued Tribes 2 when it was first released. Not long after Tribes 2's launch, the publisher, Sierra (now a part of Vivendi Universal Games), made a commitment to improve the game, and it has continued to support it with various patches and upgrades.

　　Tribes is back. With a vengeance.

　　But the publisher also intends to produce an all-new Tribes game, and it has recruited Irrational Games, the creator of System Shock 2 and Freedom Force, to produce the game's single-player campaign. If you've played the Tribes series, you'll know that although the games feature complex multiplayer gameplay, they have little to nothing in the way of a substantial single-player game. However, among Sierra's Earthsiege, Starsiege, and Tribes games, the series has several centuries of history that involve powerful warring factions and planetary conquest, and Tribes: Vengeance's developers want to bring that history to life in the new game. However, they faced a real challenge in this--one that Irrational's Ken Levine decided to tackle in a rather unusual fashion.

　　According to Levine, many games with lengthy background stories take the approach of burying new players under huge amounts of information at the very beginning of the game--information laden with meaningless "proper nouns," such as the Imperial Guards of So-And-So, and the Royal Kingdom of Whatever. As Levine explained, this information means nothing to new players, so they usually ignore it completely. That's why he and his team are working on a single-player story whose structure will resemble that of Neal Stephenson's sci-fi novel Cryptonomicon, a novel that switched back and forth between two different characters in two different time periods, and then gradually brought the stories together.

　　In Tribes: Vengeance, the soldier inside will be just as important as the armor he's wearing.

　　According to Levine, this narrative style lets players see each character through the eyes of others, rather than simply playing a single character throughout the entire game. This not only gives the characters real depth, but it also lets Irrational's developers gradually introduce the sophisticated technology and complex politics of the Tribes universe to new players without overwhelming them. As Tribes' brand manager Alex Rodberg explained, the members of the development team "are all grown-ups who are tired of fighting the big, evil dragon to rescue the princess for the millionth time." This is why Tribes: Vengeance will have "shades of gray," focusing on complex characters with different agendas and omitting anything so obvious as the "bioderm" aliens from Tribes 2.

A Single-Player Game? What You Say?!

　　In addition, the single-player campaign in Tribes: Vengeance will feature diverse missions and objectives that will help ease new players into Tribes' complex gameplay and get them ready to compete online. According to Rodberg, Tribes fans practically think of their favorite game as a sport, especially with the addition of the Rabbit gameplay mods created by enthusiast Michael "KineticPoet" Johnston, who has since joined the development team as a multiplayer designer. The single-player mode will actually include a segment in which the game is played as a popular competitive sport in front of a huge audience, complete with color commentary and screen-within-screen playbacks.

　　Tribes fans think of the game as sport, so the single-player mode will have an actual sports section.

　　To give us an idea of what the Sierra and Irrational teams are going for, representatives from both groups showed us an extremely early demonstration of the game that Irrational had originally created to pitch its services to the publisher. The demonstration showed a character named Julia making a drop onto an enemy planet in search of a character who had murdered her mother many years ago. Though what we watched was almost a year old and was created solely for demonstration purposes (one of the character's voices was actually provided by the same Irrational staffer who voiced the Man-Bot character from Freedom Force), the sequence showed off several technical features that will be used in the final game, which will be powered by a modified version of the Unreal engine.

　　We watched the Julia character infiltrate an enemy base, which caused soldiers to sound the alarm and come running. As Rodberg explained, you'll fight intelligent enemies in the single-player campaign who will actually leave their posts and converge on your position. As Julia finally confronted her old enemy, the game switched to a playable flashback sequence in which Julia, as a small child, was forced to run for her life as her palatial home was invaded. Though the sequence was still played from the first-person perspective, the child Julia had no weapons at all and was much shorter than an adult, and later on in the level, she strapped on a jumpjet that was far too powerful for her tiny frame.

　　The development team wants to make the simple act of moving around enjoyable in itself.

　　Tribes: Vengeance's game engine will allow for interesting changes of pace such as this. The game will use the Karma physics engine for complex object animation, such as banners that flap in the wind and deformable barriers that break and bend under heavy fire. But according to producer Chris Mahnken, the team found that it had to write a great deal of the physics code from scratch to accommodate the game's high-speed gameplay. This is because once you do have a jumpjet and a decent set of equipment, the gameplay in Tribes: Vengeance will be at least as fast an in the previous games, and in some cases, faster. As Mahnken explained, one of the team's goals was to make moving around enjoyable in itself. As such, movement in the new game will be built upon three of the most basic maneuvers in the Tribes series: flying using a jumpjet, rocket jumping, and skiing.

Getting Tribal. For Great Justice.

　　We were able to test out the basics of movement in Tribes: Vengeance by briefly playing on an empty map called "Emerald" that was part of a 35-percent-complete version of the game. Though neither the map nor the control scheme are finalized at this point, flying with a jumpjet seems as intuitive as in previous Tribes games--you simply press your jumpjet key (the right mouse button by default) to float until your jumpjet meter runs out. Skiing--basically, gliding along the ground after landing from a jump or jumpjet run without losing any forward momentum--is performed by holding down the jump key (the space bar by default). Rocket jumping is performed in a manner similar to in the Quake games--you point your weapon at the ground, fire, and then jump immediately, which causes you to leap much higher than normal.

　　The game will have the huge outdoor environments that its fans have come to expect.

　　In this particular level, we were able to use an old Tribes favorite, the spinfusor, as well as a grenade launcher and a minigun. You can expect Tribes: Vengeance's spinfusor, battle suits, and vehicles to look considerably different from what you might be used to, since the game is supposed to take place about 400 years before the first Tribes game. However, Levine welcomes the freedom that this different time period affords his team. Irrational is not only free from having to exactly reproduce all the technology in the Tribes universe, but the developer can also display the series' technology in a much more interesting, and primal, form. Levine made an analogy to airplanes. Specifically, modern passenger aircraft are so technologically advanced that building a powerful engine and an aerodynamic chassis are second nature--airlines can focus on passenger comfort and amenities to the extent that being on a modern airplane practically seems like sitting in a living room. This wasn't the case with early-20th-century biplanes, whose huge propellers and sputtering engines were far more obvious because their designs emphasized function over form. Levine explained that much of Tribes: Vengeance's technology will show this bias as well.

　　While this may all sound like pretty standard Tribes gameplay, Mahnken stated that by skillfully combining jumpjets with skiiing (as well as with other movement options that will be revealed at a later date), players will be able to attain speeds of a simulated 100 kilometers per hour and higher. We ourselves were able to reach incredible speeds across the bumpy foothills and crags of the Emerald map with this method, at least until we bumped into a building. Tribes: Vengeance will break from its predecessors by including huge architectural features in its maps, from a single building in the middle of a field, to a humongous hovering mothership in a capture-the-flag map, to an enormous ruined city consisting of shattered skyscrapers. According to Rodberg, fans of the Tribes series expect huge outdoor maps, but the development team didn't just want to remake one of the previous games with better graphics, so the team is taking advantage of the Unreal engine's ability to render huge architectural objects to make levels that are different in terms of both appearance and gameplay. And, as Rodberg added, these new structures also serve as good landmarks on the horizon to enhance the sense of speed that players will feel while they're skiing.

　　Many levels in Tribes: Vengeance will also feature huge architecture.

　　Vivendi Universal and Irrational Games have set their sights high with their next project, but from what we've seen, they're off to a good start. The ambitious game is tentatively set for release near the end of next year, but we'll definitely have more updates on it before then.