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TribesNext - Tribes 2 free and returned! [NSf56k]
piL
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
?No.
Warmer.
Red fucking hot!
Tribes 2 is the sequel to Starsiege: Tribes, a spinoff of the Starsiege franchise.
Blood Eagle
Diamond Sword
Star Wolf
Children of the Phoenix
Now I know what you're thinking: "piL, you never played Tribes 2!"
First of all, who are you? I don't know you, how do you know what I did or didn't do? Anyway, this is all but technically true. This game came out, my friend had it. There were rumors abound about it not working on my video card. My friend came over and we tried his copy. The rumors were substantiated, and that was that. It was patched up later, but I was young. Stupid. I didn't keep up with video game news all that well, especially games I had already written off.
But I did play the shit out of the first Tribes!
History
A thread like this probably shouldn't include backstory, but this one will anyway, because the backstory is so interesting.
This story, like many such stories, starts with a hero. A good, kind, and beneficent hero, that went by the name of Dynamix. Dynamix was founded in Eugene, Oregon in 1984 by Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye. They made a number of excellent games, and if you have a history with games, you probably remember them. The Incredible Machine, for example, was a personal staple at school, along side Oregon Trail and Number Crunchers. They also developed the first Mechwarrior game for Activision in 1989, but the year after they were purchased by Sierra. This might be conjecture, but I assume that Sierra didn't have the MechWarrior license, and that would probably be the reason they didn't make the sequel.
Now, MechWarrior wasn't the only vehicle simulation game Dynamix was responsible. Skyfox, Abram's Tank Battle, A-10 Tank Killer, Red Baron, and Aces of the Pacific. These aren't all the awesome games they made up, but they certainly had a history of putting the player in some sort of vehicle.
By the time 1994 came, they were ready to make another Mech game. They had probably been working on it for a while, but whatever. The rights to MechWarrior were, I assume, secured long ago by Activision, so it was up to Dynamix to develop their own property.
Metaltech: Earthsiege was that property. And the rest, as they say is history. They went on to make a sequel. And another, this one leaving Earth--Starsiege, released in 1998. Co-developed at the same time was the spin off, Starsiege: Tribes. One of the first online-only FPSes, it had poor sales but great reviews, and personally accounted for a huge chunk of my life. In 2001 would come Tribes 2, which would sell about 1 million copies, and I would woefully miss.
Unfortunately, Vivendi decided that what with the dot com burst and all, software were a tough sale. They handed Sierra an axe and with it Sierra cut off the last vestiges of its humanity.
It's not all bad. Many veterans left to form GarageGames, who currently have an free online game website called Instant Action, which has a rather fun, simplified Tribes clone on it. On another day, I'd call for a Game-On there.
This story, like many such stories, starts with a hero. A good, kind, and beneficent hero, that went by the name of Dynamix. Dynamix was founded in Eugene, Oregon in 1984 by Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye. They made a number of excellent games, and if you have a history with games, you probably remember them. The Incredible Machine, for example, was a personal staple at school, along side Oregon Trail and Number Crunchers. They also developed the first Mechwarrior game for Activision in 1989, but the year after they were purchased by Sierra. This might be conjecture, but I assume that Sierra didn't have the MechWarrior license, and that would probably be the reason they didn't make the sequel.
Now, MechWarrior wasn't the only vehicle simulation game Dynamix was responsible. Skyfox, Abram's Tank Battle, A-10 Tank Killer, Red Baron, and Aces of the Pacific. These aren't all the awesome games they made up, but they certainly had a history of putting the player in some sort of vehicle.
By the time 1994 came, they were ready to make another Mech game. They had probably been working on it for a while, but whatever. The rights to MechWarrior were, I assume, secured long ago by Activision, so it was up to Dynamix to develop their own property.
Metaltech: Earthsiege was that property. And the rest, as they say is history. They went on to make a sequel. And another, this one leaving Earth--Starsiege, released in 1998. Co-developed at the same time was the spin off, Starsiege: Tribes. One of the first online-only FPSes, it had poor sales but great reviews, and personally accounted for a huge chunk of my life. In 2001 would come Tribes 2, which would sell about 1 million copies, and I would woefully miss.
Unfortunately, Vivendi decided that what with the dot com burst and all, software were a tough sale. They handed Sierra an axe and with it Sierra cut off the last vestiges of its humanity.
It's not all bad. Many veterans left to form GarageGames, who currently have an free online game website called Instant Action, which has a rather fun, simplified Tribes clone on it. On another day, I'd call for a Game-On there.
Oh. You wanted the fuckawesome fictional story of Tribes.
Well you should have said so, because man it's cool. Spoilers await!
Now again, I haven't played the whole series. I played Earthsiege before I really paid attention to the game's story, and I played Starsiege, and I played Starsiege: Tribes. I read the shit out of the Starsiege manual and to a lesser extent the Tribes one, so I'll do what I can. There are some differences between Starsiege's account and Earthsiege's account, so I'll go with Starsiege.
"Little old Peter, missing his liter, while Hercy plays in the Red.
Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches, and we slept after eating our dead..."
A brilliant genius and head of Sentinel Cybertronix by the name of Solomon Petresun created a super-advanced artificial intelligence named Prometheus in 2471. Prometheus was used for a variety of tasks, but the major one the government (the North American Prefecture, to be exact) chose to use was to create cybernetic HERCULAN ('Siege's particular word for Mech) pilots that people wouldn't have to feel guilty about killing or letting die. These were termed Cybrids, a portmanteau of "Cybernetic Hybrids".
If that wasn't obviously a fuck-up enough, it wasn't the only error. Prometheus was also used to transfer people's brains into cybernetic robot brains that could be moved into a new body once the old body died. This way, a select few could avoid death. Solomon avoided having this done to himself for a while, but eventually he allowed Prometheus to do it to him. When their minds were linked, Prometheus hoped to understand it's father, but instead found a fearful and illogical mind. It determined that Cybrids were the next stage of evolution. Petreson was so shocked by the dark thoughts of Prometheus that he fell into a coma for months, unable to stop the coming storm.
Prometheus began his plans to strike at humanity, and in 2602, in an event known as The Fire or the first Earthsiege, it launched first strikes at military centers around the globe. Humanity was left defenseless and forced to take refuge from the Cybrids, while the Cybrids simply waited for man to die out. They left, however, a war museum filled with human-piloted HERCs in Baja, California was left, and that was the beginning of the Terran Defense Force, which proceeded to drive the Cybrids off of Earth through twenty years of guerrilla warfare.
Petreson warned of the inevitable return of the Cybrids, and Prometheus attacked from the moon two years later in 2064. Not yet recovered, and having no way to deal with Cybrid's ability to deploy anywhere on the earth through drop-pods, the future looked grim. A small group of elite TDF soldiers carried a nuke into the Cybrid base on the moon and detonated it. The Cybrid forces had fallen into disarray, and were mopped up by the TDF, but Prometheus, however, had escaped.
Two hundred years later, humanity was stronger than before. Earth and its colonies on The Moon, Mars, and Venus were united and led by the Immortal Emperor Emperor Solomon Petresun, the Voice of Humanity, who was kept alive through chemical baths, tubes, and the like. Earth is propserous and well defended by the Imperial Navy and the elite Imperial Knights. The colonies, however, are ruled unjustly, and were declared to be mere tools in the fortification of Earth.
The colonists did not appreciate this, and a rebellion begins on Mars using work HERCs and hidden caches of alien weapons. One of the major figures in the rebellion is a Harabec "The Phoenix" Weathers also known as Bek Storm (voiced by Mark Hamill), a skilled immortal and one of the most famous rebels of the war, known for his piloting skills. Meanwhile Cybrid spies were hidden on Earth gathering information. Some of the in-game message boards even reported Cybrid spies exploding in cities and killing citizens.
Long story short, the Cybrids would attack again, and Earth Empire and the Rebellion joined forces to fight the Cybrids. Humanity would travel the stars, hunting the Cybrids down, and in the course of their trips they discovered massive jumpgates that allowed man to travel through space. Man traveled far, and those who remained isolated began, with pride, to identify themselves as tribes. Blood Eagle, Star Wolf, Diamond Sword, and the Children of the Phoenix (named after Harabec Weathers). HERCs become difficult to maintain without Earth's infrastructure, and so personal powered armor becomes the weapons of choice.
Tribal violence ensues, and as the deathtoll rises, the Children of the Phoenix try to keep the peace. They develop rules for the tribes to use, in the way the Geneva Convention behaves. A regular Firetruce is designed to be held, and they hold games, much like the Olympics, only with flag captures and plasma guns. Conflict continues to wage on. You're a warrior in that war.
There's more stuff, but I don't exactly know it. A rebelling human-created soldier-work race called the BioDerms show up in Tribes 2. Some stuff happens in Tribes: Vengence, but I have no idea.
"Little old Peter, missing his liter, while Hercy plays in the Red.
Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches, and we slept after eating our dead..."
A brilliant genius and head of Sentinel Cybertronix by the name of Solomon Petresun created a super-advanced artificial intelligence named Prometheus in 2471. Prometheus was used for a variety of tasks, but the major one the government (the North American Prefecture, to be exact) chose to use was to create cybernetic HERCULAN ('Siege's particular word for Mech) pilots that people wouldn't have to feel guilty about killing or letting die. These were termed Cybrids, a portmanteau of "Cybernetic Hybrids".
If that wasn't obviously a fuck-up enough, it wasn't the only error. Prometheus was also used to transfer people's brains into cybernetic robot brains that could be moved into a new body once the old body died. This way, a select few could avoid death. Solomon avoided having this done to himself for a while, but eventually he allowed Prometheus to do it to him. When their minds were linked, Prometheus hoped to understand it's father, but instead found a fearful and illogical mind. It determined that Cybrids were the next stage of evolution. Petreson was so shocked by the dark thoughts of Prometheus that he fell into a coma for months, unable to stop the coming storm.
Prometheus began his plans to strike at humanity, and in 2602, in an event known as The Fire or the first Earthsiege, it launched first strikes at military centers around the globe. Humanity was left defenseless and forced to take refuge from the Cybrids, while the Cybrids simply waited for man to die out. They left, however, a war museum filled with human-piloted HERCs in Baja, California was left, and that was the beginning of the Terran Defense Force, which proceeded to drive the Cybrids off of Earth through twenty years of guerrilla warfare.
Petreson warned of the inevitable return of the Cybrids, and Prometheus attacked from the moon two years later in 2064. Not yet recovered, and having no way to deal with Cybrid's ability to deploy anywhere on the earth through drop-pods, the future looked grim. A small group of elite TDF soldiers carried a nuke into the Cybrid base on the moon and detonated it. The Cybrid forces had fallen into disarray, and were mopped up by the TDF, but Prometheus, however, had escaped.
Two hundred years later, humanity was stronger than before. Earth and its colonies on The Moon, Mars, and Venus were united and led by the Immortal Emperor Emperor Solomon Petresun, the Voice of Humanity, who was kept alive through chemical baths, tubes, and the like. Earth is propserous and well defended by the Imperial Navy and the elite Imperial Knights. The colonies, however, are ruled unjustly, and were declared to be mere tools in the fortification of Earth.
The colonists did not appreciate this, and a rebellion begins on Mars using work HERCs and hidden caches of alien weapons. One of the major figures in the rebellion is a Harabec "The Phoenix" Weathers also known as Bek Storm (voiced by Mark Hamill), a skilled immortal and one of the most famous rebels of the war, known for his piloting skills. Meanwhile Cybrid spies were hidden on Earth gathering information. Some of the in-game message boards even reported Cybrid spies exploding in cities and killing citizens.
Long story short, the Cybrids would attack again, and Earth Empire and the Rebellion joined forces to fight the Cybrids. Humanity would travel the stars, hunting the Cybrids down, and in the course of their trips they discovered massive jumpgates that allowed man to travel through space. Man traveled far, and those who remained isolated began, with pride, to identify themselves as tribes. Blood Eagle, Star Wolf, Diamond Sword, and the Children of the Phoenix (named after Harabec Weathers). HERCs become difficult to maintain without Earth's infrastructure, and so personal powered armor becomes the weapons of choice.
Tribal violence ensues, and as the deathtoll rises, the Children of the Phoenix try to keep the peace. They develop rules for the tribes to use, in the way the Geneva Convention behaves. A regular Firetruce is designed to be held, and they hold games, much like the Olympics, only with flag captures and plasma guns. Conflict continues to wage on. You're a warrior in that war.
There's more stuff, but I don't exactly know it. A rebelling human-created soldier-work race called the BioDerms show up in Tribes 2. Some stuff happens in Tribes: Vengence, but I have no idea.
"You've gone on for a long while, your download's at 91%, and you still haven't told me why Tribes's gameplay was awesome."
I probably don't need too, but I will anyway for the poor souls who missed out.
Unlike other FPSes, Tribes had jetpacks. Not only did this let you fly, it also allowed you to ski--by using the shape of the terrain as you used your jet pack along its surface, you could build up massive speeds to cross the terrain.
Unlike other FPSes at the time, it had vehicles. Maybe it's just my rosy tinted goggles, but I remember these vehicles being well controlled, especially for vehicles at the time. Tribes 1 had all aerial vehicles, and they were done well. Tribes 2 introduced ground based vehicles, but somebody else will have to tell you whether or not they were cool.
Unlike other FPSes at the time, it had wide open spaces! At least from my perspective. In 1999, my friends were playing Unreal Tournament, Quake 2 (and soon to be Quake 3), and Half-life. All good games in their own right (except for maybe UT :P), but they were all a little claustrophobic compared to Tribes' huge bases, wide geography, and fun-tp-slide-across valleys.
In many ways, it managed to be more complex than other FPSes, while maintaining a very fast gameplay. Different armor loadouts would change what you could do, and many mods would increase the variation available, while once you were suited up and shooting you would find enemies coming from multiple directions (this was a time when 32 player servers weren't so common if I remember correctly) at terrific speeds. There was always a lot going on. Plus, there were stations and facilities that needed to be defended/destroyed, and served as excellent secondary objectives other than "grab flag" "defend flag".
That's why Tribes was awesome. I hope Tribes 2 was the same way.
Unlike other FPSes at the time, it had vehicles. Maybe it's just my rosy tinted goggles, but I remember these vehicles being well controlled, especially for vehicles at the time. Tribes 1 had all aerial vehicles, and they were done well. Tribes 2 introduced ground based vehicles, but somebody else will have to tell you whether or not they were cool.
Unlike other FPSes at the time, it had wide open spaces! At least from my perspective. In 1999, my friends were playing Unreal Tournament, Quake 2 (and soon to be Quake 3), and Half-life. All good games in their own right (except for maybe UT :P), but they were all a little claustrophobic compared to Tribes' huge bases, wide geography, and fun-tp-slide-across valleys.
In many ways, it managed to be more complex than other FPSes, while maintaining a very fast gameplay. Different armor loadouts would change what you could do, and many mods would increase the variation available, while once you were suited up and shooting you would find enemies coming from multiple directions (this was a time when 32 player servers weren't so common if I remember correctly) at terrific speeds. There was always a lot going on. Plus, there were stations and facilities that needed to be defended/destroyed, and served as excellent secondary objectives other than "grab flag" "defend flag".
That's why Tribes was awesome. I hope Tribes 2 was the same way.
""You keep going and going, but you haven't actually talked about what this thread is actually about."
Fine. Fuck.
In 2004, Sierra released Tribes 2 for free. There were a limited number of cd-keys, however, and they quickly went. Some people (like me) were unfortunate and didn't get any before they ran out. If you had, it wouldn't matter now, because on November 3, Vivendi shut down the servers, and so you wouldn't be able to connect without some wizardry.
On January 2nd, the TribesNext beta launched. This allows people to once again play Tribes 2 multiplayer on the internet! And since Tribes 2 is free, that means you can now play Tribes 2 for free on the internet. What did I miss? What did you miss? If you didn't miss it then, don't you miss it now? This thread is for addressing those questions, and also to celebrate the new release of TribesNext.
A flash intro, more information, and the appropriate downloads can be found here.
I just booted this up to make sure it works and got into a game for 10 seconds. Killed a heavy, died, and closed. I suck, but whatever. Let me know anything that needs to be changed in the OP. I could probably use more pictures, so if you got or get any good screen shots, let me know!
The glorious Job threw up a server for the game; shower him with praise!
piL on
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You left out the one about installing the Tribes 2 patch.
Does that make me awesome?
EDIT: Fuck me I'm blind
I used to learn how to use photoshop by making skins for this game.
I found them on my FTP after a bit of digging, if anyone wants to see what I was up to like seven years ago.
http://www.fusedcreations.com/adam/t2skins.zip
Lol
Switch: 6200-8149-0919 / Wii U: maximumzero / 3DS: 0860-3352-3335 / eBay Shop
Can anyone confirm if the patch will work on a retail install?
I never finish anyth
Good to know it's not just me. I just lost an hour playing this again. It's kind of strange that despite not playing it for 5 or 6 years, almost everything came back immediately.
Is there much activity on the assault or whatever it's called yet? That was always my favorite mode, not counting the Air Assault mod.
:^:
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
comrade!
I know this is probably an incredibly dumb question, but- what other games have been released since the Tribes series that are similar in gameplay? The base-building aspect was awesome, but there was just something about the absolutely massive feel of the maps that I really loved.
Gaming and Non-Gaming 2009 Resolutions
I own the game, but I doubt it plays nice with this.
I might play sometime. But fuck if I don't have too many games as it is. I haven't touched Last Remnant, barely got into Assassins Creed, picked up Prince of Persia today, Fallout 3 is in the mail as is Boom Blox. And I still haven't played Metroid Prime 3 even though I got it at launch because I still haven't finished MP:2.
/sigh
The worst part is that between WoW and being my wife's chauffeur while she's recovering, I don't have time to play any of these. Something's gotta give.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Range is too short, as I recall. However, it was great for taking down turrets... drop a mine right under the turret, drain the shields, then throw a grenade.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
ET Quake Wars. It does have classes, vehicles (you can pseudo sky with one of them), deployables like radar, artillery and turrets, and unlike BF, it is in the realm of fast action.
I like Fallen Legions, but it doesn't feel the same. I do appreciate how much easier it is to ski in Fallen Legions though, and how they made the maps even bigger. It's good to know they're still working on it, I had sort of assumed they were just done with it.
Donate or order a gameserver and help out!
I as well will be getting in on this.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.