Nearly eight years ago, Sierra released a game by the name of Tribes 2 at the time, it was highly regarded, with robust multiplayer functionality and futuristic combat a main part of its appeal, in addition to large maps. In 2004, the game was offered as freeware, which saw an influx of new players.

On the 3rd of November 2008, to the dismay of fans of the game, Vivendi (the parent company of Sierra) turned off the game's master server preventing the ability for new accounts to be made, or for people to play the game over the Internet. This has been resolved by a group of die-hard fans, who have released a multiplayer patch (dubbed TribesNext), allowing play on a new, unofficial master server.

It is important to note that the multiplayer patch is a beta release, and that all bugs encountered should be reported to the developer's forums. In order to play Tribes 2 online, you'll need to install both the un-patched game client and the TribesNext multiplayer patch.

Finally, several ports need to be opened on the firewall of any system, with these being 27999, 28000, and 28001-29000. There are a number of known issues with the authentication system at present, but the developers are working on resolving these, as many of them are minor. The first of these are issues with the account creation (which is encrypted in up to 1024 bit), of which a fix is to use a 512 or 768 bit key during the generation of accounts whilst installing.

Other issues are minor - and related to a Ruby interpreter which has been packaged with the multiplayer patch, enabling the game to run. These issues range from crashes in which the process "rubyintersect.dll" must be manually terminated, to a few issues whilst running the game under Wine in Linux. Finally, the Defence Turret is not supported in game due to "significant changes" to the game's executable file.


For those who'd like to give this one a go, (it is free after all!) you can grab the game client (around 540MB) from the file mirror, and the Tribes Next multiplayer patch (1.4MB)from our file mirror. If you're an Internode customer, the data is un-metered, too!