If the crew at GarageGames had a nickel for every time the phrase "Tribes-like" was used to describe their new online, team-based FPS venture, they probably wouldn't need to release the game.

After all, the company was founded by former members of Dynamix, the developer which spawned Starsiege: Tribes--a game so ahead of its time in the multiplayer arena that it has yet to be equaled in many respects.

Jet-packs and chainguns aside, Fallen Empires: Legion will be its own experience, in part due to the method of delivery: the game will be bought, streamed, and played on its promising web portal InstantAction.com, which aims to bridge the gap between casual and hardcore audiences with its browser-based offerings.

Though the realm of web-based gaming conjures images of simple stick-figure shoot-em-ups and rudimentary 3D time-wasters, Fallen Empires project director Tim Aste and GarageGames CEO Josh Williams insist that their new multiplayer game will be anything but your average time-waster.

Shack: As far as core gameplay goes, how far are you edging into original-Tribes territory? Is this really a spiritual sequel?

Tim Aste: We don't own or have a license to anything having to do with the Tribes games, though of course we love them and GG was founded by some key members of the Tribes teams. Still, we'd never set out to create a simple rip-off.

We're taking inspiration from all sorts of games, as all game developers do. Really, we're trying to build a game we've always wanted to play here, taking the best of games we love and hopefully adding some unique and cool things of our own. As far as inspiration, we loved the freedom of movement Tribes gave players--it was unlike anything else at the time--and offering players freedom of movement at a level that hasn't been seen before is a core goal of our design for this new game.

We also love games like Tribes that emphasize team play and strategic combat, and our design rewards good team play and strategic thinking too. I love the trend that Tribes helped start where games are integrating more community features like leader boards, chat and more, and of course being on the web within the browser we're pushing the envelope on community features too.

We're not doing a real successor to Tribes... We can't. But we do love the spirit of Tribes and other games that play great and take chances doing innovative new things with their gameplay. If we succeed in having the same sort of spirit of innovation and focus on fun gameplay, then that's an accomplishment we'll all feel proud of.

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Shack: Is Legions a straight-up FPS, or will there be a third person camera option as well?

Tim Aste: Yes, it's an FPS. Right now we have third person cams, observer cams, and the like, but the game is being designed to be played from the first-person.

Shack: So, we know it's a team-based multiplayer FPS. Will there be multiple modes of gameplay? Capture-the-flag, I'm guessing? What else?

Tim Aste: We actually have several modes in right now, but we are still in early development. We mock-up and test out lots of gameplay modes so we can play the heck out of all of them and through iteration find which ones are most promising to develop fully.

Josh Williams: This again is why we want players to sign up now to get in the early beta that we'll launch soon. Things will still be rough with the game in early beta, just like they were in QTest and such back in the day, but we want player feedback on their favorite game modes.

Tim Aste: Yeah, we'd rather polish the heck out of one or two and add more content through our live development plan once we see how these modes are received. We want to listen to player feedback from day one and make the decisions along with them, which we think is pretty cool and fairly different from most developers.

Shack: Will we see some skiing action?

Tim Aste: We aren't doing "skiing" exactly as in Tribes. But we do want players to be able to move quickly and easily across terrain and through the air, so fast movement across terrain--and other surfaces--is a big deal for us. Again, if you jump in and start playing in the beta, you'll see exactly what we mean--we're sort of doing skiing like it might have been done if it were designed in from day one, as opposed to being a bug.

Shack: How about vehicles? Arming stations? Deployables? Varied armor classes? I see a chaingun--how about a disc-gun?

Tim Aste: Vehicles...no, not right now. Honestly, we think most of the time vehicles are tacked onto FPS games as a marketing bullet point more than a vital piece of the gameplay. Most of the time they are unbalanced, unfair, and they don't even work that well. It's like developers go, "Hey, after Halo and the Warthog, people expect vehicles in FPSs, we just gotta do it." Forget that.

Same thing with deployables. Sometimes, they're great and for larger maps and big team battles in strategic game modes, they can make sense, as they did in Tribes. But we really don't want to spend a bunch of time doing deployables and the like when job one is to make sure the core of the gameplay is fun. Is moving around cool? Is combat fun? Will players sit down to play this for 10 minutes and look up 3 hours later and realize they're going to be late for work in the morning if they don't stop...and then keep playing anyway? That's the piece we want to make sure we get down first.

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