Tribes: Vengeance Updated Q&A

You could say that first-person shooters, the fast-paced games that let you run around blasting everything that isn't you, have evolved over the years to emphasize teamwork over simple run-and-gun gameplay. You could also say that Sierra's Tribes series has contributed greatly to this change of focus. The Tribes games let you play as a futuristic soldier armed with heavy-duty weapons and the ability to "ski" (quickly gliding down hills and ridges) as part of a squadron tasked with capturing an enemy base or flag. Tribes 2 added new gameplay modes and drivable vehicles, and the next game, Tribes: Vengeance, will feature a comprehensive single-player campaign with a complex story. It will also feature plenty of new toys to play with in multiplayer.

That's a lot of rockets.

We're fortunate enough to be able to reveal some of these new toys to you now. Tribes: Vengeance features an all-new infantry weapon that is tentatively called the rocket pod. It's a handheld weapon that fires a cluster of rockets that can then be guided manually by using mouse-look. These rockets spread out slightly from one another and deal a significant amount of damage to a targeted area, which makes it especially dangerous against large targets, like vehicles and enemy base fixtures.

Tribes: Vengeance also introduces an all-new vehicle: the rover. This armored land vehicle serves an important support function as a mobile spawn point for your allies, who can, with some clever driving, be dropped behind enemy lines. It's not an offensive vehicle, but it can move quickly when it has to.

For more information on these new additions to the Tribes universe, as well as a general update on Tribes: Vengeance's development, we spoke with two key members of the team: designer Michael Johnston, from Irrational Games' Australian studio in Canberra, and Alex "Marweas" Rodberg, brand manager of the Tribes series at Vivendi Universal Games Northwest (also known as Sierra).

GameSpot: Thanks for taking the time for this interview. How far along is the game at this point, or is that even a fair question? It seems like Tribes: Vengeance is practically being developed as two separate games. So we'll ask, how far along is the game's single-player mode, and how far along is multiplayer? What aspects of the game are the team members working on now?

Michael Johnston: Tribes: Vengeance is about 65 percent complete, which means we're on target for a release in Q4 2004. Although the game does feature plenty of single-player and multiplayer content, a great deal of the content and code is shared. For example, all of the player models and map assets are the same in the single-player and multiplayer games. All of the weapons, equipment, vehicles, and physics are also the same. This is deliberate. One of the goals of the single-player experience is to ease players into the multiplayer experience by gradually teaching them about the game in an interesting, story-driven way.

If you're going to wage interplanetary war, you need the right set of wheels.

The main difference between single-player and multiplayer development is the maps themselves. Single-player-specific features [include] AI and mission scripting, [while] multiplayer-specific features [include] server administration and gameplay balancing. Currently, the team has nearly finished its first pass on a bunch of stuff, including all our single-player missions, all character models, all player physics, and most weapons and base equipment. We're constantly cranking out multiplayer maps as well--testing them and discarding a fairly large percentage of them as part of a learning process.

Alex Rodberg: While the team in Australia is continuing to build and script the single-player levels, we spent some time, recently, working with some Hollywood writers to polish up the dialogue in the game. We're taking storytelling very seriously in Tribes, and Ken Levine and Irrational are cooking up something truly sublime.