HomeLAN - Much has been made on creating a solid story-oriented single player experience for Tribes: Vengeance. Why was the decision made to have the game have more of a single player experience?

Chris Mahnken - There is a long list of reasons why we wanted to do the single player game for Tribes: Vengeance. The first was as a way to encourage more new players. Tribes requires more skill than most shooters and new players of the first two games face the daunting challenge of learning to play while trying to avoid the existing base of veteran players. Since Tribes and Tribes 2 were both exclusively online games new players never had a chance to build up their skills before going online. With the single player campaign players will have the basics down before they play online, which will let them play with the veterans right away.

The second reason is we simply wanted to push the bounds of story telling in shooters. The way stories are told in shooters really hasn't improved since Half-Life released. You typically play an entire story from the view of one person, never seeing the important things which happen to other people in the story. Limiting yourself to a single character places a huge restriction on the type of story you can tell. We felt that it was time to push that boundary a bit. Some people in our organization were worried that switching characters in the middle of a game would be confusing to the player, but I think that we've convinced them that the gaming world is sophisticated enough to appreciate the change.

One of the other reasons is that the Tribes Universe is simply cool. It's a great place to tell a story and the part of the timeline we chose is full of interesting events. The guys at Irrational are great at story driven games and I think everybody will be pleased with the story they've crafted.