>>> in designing the game how are you balancing the network/multiplayer with the story driven singleplayer(or maybe multi?) portion of the product? <<<

The multiplayer game will ignore the story and simply focus on various Dukematch games. There will also be several multiplay-only levels, and possibly a weapon or two only available in multiplay. I doubt we'll include the more difficult game types like CTF, mainly because multiplayer focused games like UT and QA3 will do these very well already.

>>>>with the networking bar raised by ut and q3a or conversely or games like thief that have totally eschewed multiplayer to focus on the single player experience (all games that have given up on the story/multiplayer combination), how have you approached this issue from a design perspective? what tradeoffs have you been forced to make in things like programmer/artist allocation, level design, weapon choices, etc.? <<<

Our focus is on the single player experience, but we know we can also provide a great multiplayer experience, too. This is exactly the approach we took with Duke 3D, and we did pretty well.