"Tribes: Vengeance, I think, was our worst game," Levine states frankly. "I don't think we loved or understood the franchise. It's one of those cases where you take a job - because you're a business and you need to take a job - and I don't think we did a great service to the Tribes community."
Irrational was hired to create a single-player, story based Tribes game. As any fan of the Tribes will tell you, this core concept is incompatible with the spirit of Tribes and what made the games popular. Regardless, that was what publisher Vivendi wanted, and that was what Irrational delivered with Tribes: Vengeance. It wasn't actually a bad game - it was just at odds with the community's expectations.
"You never know how something is going to be recieved," Wells observes. "Sometimes its easy to misjudge a small but extremely vocal group of superfans."
Levine adds: "In terms of our portfolio, I look at all the other titles and I see where they fit, and I still don't understand really where Tribes fits in."
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