Interview: Irrational goes Tribal

The Tribes series has been a long-standing pillar of the hardcore online action community, but the next episode, Vengeance, is to buck the trend by introducing a strong single-player component to what has always been a multiplayer-focused franchise.

Development of the latest Tribes instalment is being handled by Irrational Games, a studio that certainly has its work cut out in ensuring it delivers not only a refreshing and exciting single-player experience but also a multiplayer component that keeps the Tribes fanbase happy.

With Tribes: Vengeance not due out until late 2004, it will be some time before we find out if Irrational can come up trumps, but to get a decent idea of where the game is headed we grabbed hold of Irrational Games' general manager and creative director Ken Levine and fired some questions his way. Ken, in his own words, is also the "story dork" on the Tribes game.

First off, not everyone may be familiar with Irrational Games. Can you give us a brief C.V.?

Levine: Irrational Games was founded in 1997 by myself and two partners. Most of us had come from a company called Looking Glass where we had worked on a title called Thief. Our first title was a game called System Shock 2.

We then opened up an office in Australia to work alongside our office in Boston and we released a game called Freedom Force. We are now working on Tribes: Vengeance from the Australian office.

Historically, Tribes has always been multiplayer, so why are you adding a strong single-player component for Vengeance?

Levine: There is one critical element to multiplayer games which presents a barrier to any new gamers coming in. That of: "I log in, some 12-year-old walks in, shoots me in the head, takes all my stuff and walks away".

There is a huge hardcore community for Tribes and we wanted to welcome new players into that community. Sierra wisely decided to introduce a single-player mode that would be both compelling in its own right and serve as a vehicle to introduce new players into the world of Tribes in a controlled fashion.

In the single-player mode, we can control the introduction of new concepts, whereas in multiplayer it's a free for all.

The Tribes storyline/history is exceedingly big. From which period of history are you taking the storyline for Vengeance?

Levine: Believe it or not, there are 12 different games which live in the Tribes universe. Not just Tribes games, but Cyberstorm games, Mission Force games and even a relatively old game called Hunter Hunted.

We decided to have this new game take place around 400 years earlier than the existing Tribes products. This allowed us a lot of freedom, as there is not a lot of existing detail about this period.

It was also fun to go backwards in technology and look at how it evolved. Existing Tribes games have F15s and 747s. This game has more of a World War One feel about it. For example, there are armour and jetpacks, but they are the first generation of that stuff which gives it a really cool look.

What kind of character are you going to have as your lead role?

Levine: There are several lead characters. Traditionally, in a single-player/first-person shooter, the gamer feels like he is on an assembly line, going from one event to the next in a chronological fashion and always in the shoes of the same character.

We wanted to break out from this in Tribes and not only have different personas and different styles of gameplay accompanying those personas, but have a different way of tracking time as well. The gamer may be following a story but a different chronology.

Think of the movie Pulp Fiction. A story is being told but the way it is presented is broken up and more 'free'. We think this is freer for the audience as well. We are putting a lot of faith in our audience by saying that we think you are ready for something more complicated than being spoon-fed a linear chronological path.

In Tribes multiplayer, there is a variety of gameplay/styles, e.g. heavy to light armour loads etc. In the single-player game, we give you a sample of all those different multiplayer styles of gameplay as well as different characters.

Can you give us an example of this style of play in single-player?

Levine: In one mission you are a second class citizen, a phoenix tribesman fighting for your life in a heavy suit of armour. Then, the next mission could see you as the Imperial Princess who also happens to be the David Beckham of the Tribes Universe and is trying to save the day for her team in a Championship Sporting match.

The next mission could see you as the same woman but as little girl, living through this catastrophic experience where you don't have any armour or jetpacks. In fact, when you find the jetpack, it is so over-powered for you, because you are this little girl that you have to learn how to fly a whole new way.

So, you are going backwards in time, to look at pre-events?

Levine: Missions follow a storyline, but not necessarily a timeline. You could go from one mission to another mission placed twenty years earlier and possibly with a different character. Gamers go back and forth between essentially two different time periods.

As gamers become more experienced, they will see the connections between the missions. The story is essentially about a mother and a daughter, both as young women and what happens to them as warriors.

If you are travelling backwards and forwards in time, what happens if you die?

Levine: As with most first-person shooters, if you die, the mission ends and you have to start the mission again. In relation to the plot, there are some deaths which occur as part of the story.

The maps for this game differ from the other Tribes games where there seemed to be a lot of terrain and land travelling. In Vengeance, things seem to have been brought a lot closer together and become more intense - was this deliberate?

Levine: What you are seeing is lot more detail. For example, on one level you see a burnt out city in the middle of a terrain. You didn't have this before, as the technology couldn't support it.

With the introduction of new videocards etc., we are able to include a lot more detail. There will be traditional Tribal maps, e.g. with rolling hills etc.

However, you will also see maps with different environments, such as indoors/outdoors, cities, undergrounds etc - things that we couldn't have before because the technology wasn't available.

We have been careful as a developer to remember that these maps have to work for Tribes gameplay, so, even in the city, you'll find that we have thought about how a Tribes character moves through the environment.

We're not doing the Battle of Stalingrad - that's in Battlefield 42. Our combat/style of movement is different. It is much broader and is all done through jetpacks. In most games, your movement options are WASD on the keyboard. In Tribes, it's WASD and jetpacks and skiing and all sorts of ways of moving. This "expressability" in the movement is unprecedented.

How has the Tribes community reacted to this game having a strong single-player section?

Levine: The initial reaction was: "Why are you adding a single-player component? You'll ruin everything!" We expected this as, generally, people who love things don't necessarily want it to change. However, I don't think it is changing that much.

When Sierra came to us initially and requested a strong single-player Tribes product, we said that essentially they were talking about two games. It recognised that it wasn't going to be a cheap or easy game to make and that it was going to take a lot of time and effort to make.

I am confident that we are going to build on the success of the previous two Tribes multiplayer games, and anybody who buys the games and just plays multiplayer is going to walk away satisfied.

Unlike previous titles, if you play it and you just want to play the single-player, there is going to be a completely competitive if not superlative single-player component, superlative in that there is this movement component to the game, this jetpack.

It is a much more free-flowing game where players can move around and have much more freedom of movement, and that implies a different level of thinking in terms of how we design levels.

Stuart Bishop