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.