Natural Selection 2
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13 Nov 2012, 16:45
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Journals
Its this time of the year again when the market is being flooded with AAA game releases and we see many reiterations of franchises that we came to love or hate but expect in any case.
The new MoH Warfighter fell many, many millions short of their original goal and has sparked rumors of EA dropping the series all together floating all over the web.
We have gotten a new CS which does, not very surprisingly, fail to pull more players than CSS does which in turn has less active players than the original has.
Today the latest edition of CoD has hit the shops and nobody is surprised either that its flying off the shelfs and why wouldnt it? They havnt changed a working system. So its just the same it as last year but people want that.
FPS gaming has become repetitive somewhat and one, being an ET player, struggles to find something that is equally interesting. Shooters are not really team-based anymore. Yes, you play as a team but no, you dont have any real teamplay mechnanics other than spotting enemies and "covering each others 6". I have seen a large portion of this community enjoy BF games a lot. It would only make sense that we feel at home in a game where there are medics and ammo guys. We want that sort of teamplay. Ill just cut out the nostaliga and get to it
Especially this busy time of year we might miss out on some gems and judging by the lack of journals about NS2 I think that might be what happend here.
Natural Selection 2 is a mashup of RTS and FPS. Some of you might remember that NS1 used to be (and still is) a 3rd party mod for Half Life 1. This means that the team of 7 devs have been working on NS2 for around 7 years now. Its based on its own ("spark") engine and is priced as an indie game (30$). You should have no trouble finding it on steam and even tho the new CoD got released today its doing rather well in the steam stats.
Competitively its played 6on6 where one person plays the RTS component of the game (commander) and 5 soldiers on the ground try to exterminte the 5 aliens of the opposing team. It features asymetrical gameplay where as the humans are always marines but the aliens have 5 different life forms to chose from which all have essentially different gameplay (inc. running on walls and ceiling, flying).
The game has a couple of components to start with (beautiful spectator overlay, full modding support, download on connect, ...) but the devs promise weekly updates which include all sorts of things (but most importantly the promised 1st person spec mode).
Ive been rambling on for a bit so ill just leave u with 2 links
tl;dr
fps is boring these days. dont complain, buy NS2. its cheap and awesome
check it out here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp-4iaKXP68
http://www.naturalselection2.com/
and get a sample of competitive play here
http://de.twitch.tv/esltv/b/339118814
(games start at 30:30)
The new MoH Warfighter fell many, many millions short of their original goal and has sparked rumors of EA dropping the series all together floating all over the web.
We have gotten a new CS which does, not very surprisingly, fail to pull more players than CSS does which in turn has less active players than the original has.
Today the latest edition of CoD has hit the shops and nobody is surprised either that its flying off the shelfs and why wouldnt it? They havnt changed a working system. So its just the same it as last year but people want that.
FPS gaming has become repetitive somewhat and one, being an ET player, struggles to find something that is equally interesting. Shooters are not really team-based anymore. Yes, you play as a team but no, you dont have any real teamplay mechnanics other than spotting enemies and "covering each others 6". I have seen a large portion of this community enjoy BF games a lot. It would only make sense that we feel at home in a game where there are medics and ammo guys. We want that sort of teamplay. Ill just cut out the nostaliga and get to it
Especially this busy time of year we might miss out on some gems and judging by the lack of journals about NS2 I think that might be what happend here.
Natural Selection 2 is a mashup of RTS and FPS. Some of you might remember that NS1 used to be (and still is) a 3rd party mod for Half Life 1. This means that the team of 7 devs have been working on NS2 for around 7 years now. Its based on its own ("spark") engine and is priced as an indie game (30$). You should have no trouble finding it on steam and even tho the new CoD got released today its doing rather well in the steam stats.
Competitively its played 6on6 where one person plays the RTS component of the game (commander) and 5 soldiers on the ground try to exterminte the 5 aliens of the opposing team. It features asymetrical gameplay where as the humans are always marines but the aliens have 5 different life forms to chose from which all have essentially different gameplay (inc. running on walls and ceiling, flying).
The game has a couple of components to start with (beautiful spectator overlay, full modding support, download on connect, ...) but the devs promise weekly updates which include all sorts of things (but most importantly the promised 1st person spec mode).
Ive been rambling on for a bit so ill just leave u with 2 links
tl;dr
fps is boring these days. dont complain, buy NS2. its cheap and awesome
check it out here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp-4iaKXP68
http://www.naturalselection2.com/
and get a sample of competitive play here
http://de.twitch.tv/esltv/b/339118814
(games start at 30:30)
the devs did promise new weapons but as this is a highly competitive game and its asymetrical nature makes balancing very hard i doubt there will be many of them.
You dont have to expect to pay any additional money for the game (other than dedicated server rental) and the fact that the game is released with full modding support lets me expect many, many community mods that, besdides competitive play, add longevity.
If you dont want to you will never have to bother with it.
i have found tho that people who were originally not very interested became quite intrigued after a while and afterall we are talking about a supporting and bulding/upgrading role rather than a fully fledged starcraft.
It looks pretty cool. You have a commander, telling you what to do, so he;s the one in charge of the RTS side of the game if I'm correct? And the rest are actually the guys who need to do what he says and protect the base, sort of speak?
How's the balance between the Aliens and the Marines?
usually you have quite a good understanding of where you should be simply because the commander and other teammates are communicating whats going on via VoIP. incredibly this is the only game with VoIP where I dont get yelled at by 12yos.
the commander will tell you where he plans to expand with a new hive/command station.
he will tell you which resource towers are being attacked. your mates will communicate their loadouts/life forms and ask you to help/follow/...
the balance is probably most similar to an RTS but then again completely different.
so marines will always be those guys that cant take a lot of beating and arent that quick to move around. however you have access to different weapons (once researched). you change your movement as a marine by either buying a jetpack (once researched) which will make you a lot more mobile and harder to kill or an exosuit which is rather slow and not really tanky but can deal a ton of damage. the commander will have to construct ressource towers with the help of his units/players and hold them to obtain the resources for research. the players have individual ressources that they obtain the same way and which they can spend on weapons and tools or evolutions and traits as an alien.
in rookie play the commander has his plan and sticks with it and the units use whatever tools he provides to try and win. a better commander will read the enemys gameplay and react accordingly.
think of it as a basic RTS for one guy but his units have no set chances of winning.
just some basic numbers to give you an idea:
a marine has 50bullets per clip in his spawning gun (no ress required).
it takes 8 bulltes to kill a skulk (spawning alien, no charge) without upgrades.
basically you could kill 6 aliens with one clip.
you empty you clip in 2-2,5sec.
you need to be good as a marine.
as alien you spawn as a skulk.
you see the world through you mouth and you can run on walls and the ceiling.
you are rather fast but if you ever try to run straight at a marine you will die horribly.
if you manage to outmanouver him you can kill an unupgraded marine with 2 bites.
you need to be good as an alien.
the game is rather expansive. in the main menu there is a button called "training" which includes a video section with over 2h of material they seem to deem somewaht essential.
http://i.imgur.com/HmR8N.png
Damn, looked pretty cool and wanted to try it out :{
not fully specced out but as it is a PC game on custom engine you have a range of video options to chose from in order to get stable fps.
Aliens have way more variety in weapon (alien spawn) choices than humans too.
Think Starcraft RTS + Alien vs Predator FPS + indoor maps only.