Some of the hottest first-person shooters on the market right now are the large-scale, team-based, multiplayer games that allow dozens of players to run around a huge level and blast each other with weapons and vehicles. Perfect examples of this are the Battlefield games and Joint Operations. You could say that the progenitor of this kind of game was Starsiege Tribes; that game introduced many of the concepts featured in today's games. Now Irrational Games is developing Tribes: Vengeance, the eagerly awaited third game in the Tribes franchise. Tribes: Vengeance is nearing the final stages of its development cycle, and we caught up with lead designer Ed Orman, senior designer Michael Johnston, lead programmer Rowan Wyborn, and producer Tony Oakden to get the latest from the bug-squashing front.

Jump jets add a considerable amount of mobility.

GameSpot: We understand that Tribes: Vengeance is in a beta test state. Could you give us an update on how the game, as a whole, is shaping up? How is the single-player campaign coming along, and judging from the testing you've seen so far, how well is the single-player game acting as a multiplayer primer?

Ed Orman: We've begun our closed beta, which is a limited release of the game, to a select group of people, most of whom have played Tribes: Vengeance before. Our intention is to use the closed beta period to begin taking feedback on balance and tuning, but also to iron out any major bugs before we open up the beta to thousands of people. So far, this has been entirely centered on multiplayer. We'll begin our closed testing of single-player very soon.

As a whole, the game is shaping up very, very well. Alpha was a great focusing exercise for us, and it's always surprising how much can be accomplished in the last few weeks before the milestone, and we're essentially feature-complete. Now we're approaching beta, during which all we'll have left to do is the monumental task of polishing single-player and tuning/balancing multiplayer, but we're in a very good position to do so.

GS: And more importantly for diehard Tribes: Vengeance fans, how is the multiplayer shaping up? Are we seeing the framework for large-scale multiplayer matches with huge numbers of players, or more intimate matches with players forming small squads? Are we seeing more multiplayer matches full of back-and-forth competition, or more momentum-based games?

Michael Johnston: The multiplayer game is taking shape. Tribes: Vengeance supports from 2 to 32 players, and 32 players is still a lot! We have a variety of maps that can result in both back-and-forth competition as well as more momentum-based games; but, in general, our maps are built in such a way that you should never feel like you have to go out and search for action. Even with smaller numbers of players on a server, your time to action is designed to be fairly quick, more like Tribes 1 than Tribes 2 in this respect.

GS: We know that one of the original goals for Tribes: Vengeance was to make mobility (and skillful use of the game's mobility options, like jump jets and skiing) at least as important as having good aim, if not more so. How are you making sure this is the case? How has this worked out in the recent testing?

MJ: More so than any other first-person shooter, Tribes: Vengeance is about the freedom of movement. Those players who learn how to move effectively have an advantage over those who don't. So our goal was actually to make it easier for new players to learn the basics of movement by making it more intuitive to acquire speed with jets and more forgiving to ski across a variety of terrain types. The single-player campaign also takes steps to teach players basic movement skills.

Having said that, the goal is also to allow you to keep improving your movement skills in the same way that you can keep improving your combat skills. The better you are at moving around, the more you can dodge during combat or even avoid combat altogether if you so choose. Importantly, these are real skills, not fictitious role-playing stats. Being skilled at movement involves anticipating other players, predicting their movement relative to your own, having a sharp awareness of your surroundings, using terrain to your advantage, managing your energy supply, and mastering the art of traversing landscapes quickly. The best players learn both movement and combat skills.