Natural Selection 2

If Natural Selection 2 is such a brilliant and genius mixture of class-based FPS and real-time strategy, if it has so much depth; then why don't PC gamers like it? Why is Natural Selection 2 dead and irrelevant?

Because their engine is badly optimized, because the dev team completely botched post-release development and because Natural Selection is better, but also abandoned because it's old.

I have never even heard of this franchise until now. ergo, you are a shill

Bad support. But pretty much all PC games are dead now, they all die soon after release. That's why I don't buy them anymore.

It was or kinda still is is badly optimized as this user said also the most important part! while the blend of strategy and fps was in my eyes superb, the blend of aliens vs humans was ablsolute poo in loo tier shit.
either the aliens were OP as fuck or the marines after updates. I played NS2 for 150 hours since release and yeah... in my eyes the game is ok, but I don't recommend it to ANYBODY.

fuck off HURR DURR SHILLL SHILL11!1
I hate you retards so much. I somehow always happen to notice calling people shills who just ask normal questions, but never true shills who give their games fake good reviews.

Didn't the original Natural Selection's community destroy itself by being elitist and not welcoming anybody new?

What I find crazy with Natural Selection 2 is that the array of strategies is far reduced compared to Natural Selection and yet the game was/is far less balanced somehow. Some patches changed balance so much you had to re-learn how to play the game at times, otherwise you'd get steamrolled by the opposing team despite having better players. There was a time when Aliens were unstoppable because they buffed an ability or something.

Haven't really experienced any elitism, and I played this game for like 2,000hrs according to XFire when it was still a thing. On the contrary most servers I played on were very welcoming of new players because of the dwindling numbers. The biggest contributions to the game's downfall were combat mode that divided the playerbase and the release of the sequel.

OP didn't ask a normal question. they asked a bait question filled with buzzwords and console war faggotry like some kind of asparagus

they botched the source 2.2 engine so much that even if youre on fucking LAN you still feel like youre playing on a 100 ping server

Gone are the days where PC games would never die. There's still a handful of 10 year old games still kicking but other than those it's release week or bust.

*sigh* I wish dumb posts were a bannable offense...

1. It was poorly balanced
2. Poor post release support
3. Lack of depth
4. No teamwork in a teamwork orientated game

He'll just toggle airplane mode and be right back at it.

I must be a glutton for punishment because NS2 and TF2 have pretty steep learning curves but once you GIT GUD, I cum so hard wreking n00bs to the point where they quit playing the game because it's not fun getting wrekt 24/7.

It's a shallower game than the original HL1 mod

because ns was free and ns2 is split into multiple games for max jewery

And now I hope you understand why Overwatch is so popular.

Do you want the long version of what the developer did to fuck the playerbase over?

Yes.

I remember playing this, was a fun game but fuck my computer ran it so badly compared to everything else. checked for any servers a few months ago and it was empty.

please elaborate

So things started off well in beta. Devs were playing around with a lot of classic ideas from NS1 but the engine was absolutely terrible. Game was released. At first it was mainly just engine improvements here and there and nothing significant which probably turned off most people as the number of maps on offer was ridiculously low.

Then their PR manager Hugh Jeremy decided to emphasize e-sports to coincide with a major content patch. This is effectively where the troubles began. Hugh was given major control over the development of the game even though he has basically no programming or design skills. He was driven by something of a personal desire to make the game into a highly competitive e-sport and many of the news posts on the website reflected that rather than details about new maps or engine improvements. So a balance patch came out and ruined the gameplay for a lot of people as there were massive changes to how aliens worked. I don't think it helped in the first place that there was a set alien commander either. These changes really pissed people off and those that stayed developed an elitist attitude similar to competitive Overwatch which is all about this ridiculous Hive ranking system which is horrendously designed.

About a year passed and Unknown Worlds released a couple of mediocre map remakes of the first game. Descent for instance is still universally hated. There was also this rather disastrous day where a sale coincided with a new patch because Hugh thought that was an amazing idea. Guess what? The patch was rushed out and broke many game features so everyone who bought the game on sale quit after the weekend.

So eventually Unknown announced it would move on to Subnautica development and a community development team would take over.

Hmmm, well I guess they are more successful with Subnautica than NsII.

So, what, they selected people from the community to take over the game? Are they getting funding?

hugh killed NS2

everybody knows this

The CDT was extremely effective for people who were more or less unpaid. They dramatically improved the engine by rewriting huge chunks of inefficient code which meant framerate went up and load times went way down. They also produced a couple of maps which were reasonable enough. Things were going really well for the community, player numbers were actually increasing and there was less elitism at long last.

But of course good things don't last. Hugh came back sometime in early 2016. He wanted weekly content updates from the CDT. The demand on them was pretty exhausting and they were ordered to work on game balance. The first problem was the frequency of these patches seriously pissed off a modder who made NS2+ which is a series of customizable HUD, sound and other options which is more or less a mod which is enabled on every single fucking NS2 server it's so integral. Next was the balancing itself which probably introduced the final nails into NS2's coffin. These were the introduction of visible enemy health bars which completely reduced the commander's role of tracking enemy health and the generally frightening experience of being a marine chomped on by an alien who isn't aware how many more rounds he has to put into it. It also made exosuits completely useless, nerfed the everliving shit out of jetpacks and made them less enjoyable to use and megabuffed onos to the point where they can be become almost invincible pub stompers. There were other stupid balance changes which made many abilities redundant so you now had a very well defined tech path for both sides and no variation in how the game is played.

The constant patches with their continued balancing changes ultimately caused a third of the community to quit within a few months. They finally added proper tutorials around this time which had been asked for since released so this was a bit of a joke as well. A few came back for Christmas but the damage had been done.

So now we're at a point where it's basically just a couple of US and Russian servers. It's impressive the game has lasted over 4 years considering it's an indie game based on a mod but things could have been handled so much better by Unknown Worlds. I caution the people who play Subnautica that after release some changes they don't like could happen there as well.

It's a goddamn shame what happened to this game. It was very painful to watch it slowly die because of the incompetence of one Australian shithead. Hugh is still working on Subnautica.

Not sure. I think they have a revenue sharing agreement in place but it doesn't make them much money.

I respect them for their passion. A lot of them really wanted this game to succeed and continue growing.

Well to live is to suffer, right?

I'll just make others suffer in my place and in doing so, attain happiness and joy.

Not even joking.

School, work, relationships.

Winning is good but crushing the spirits of your rivals is even better.

The design of the game too often lead to complete stomps. Also nobody wanted to be commander, which is understandable because fighting was way more fun.

I've been on the playtest team for years and I don't even play the game in pubs anymore because of this. The community ate itself alive, and shits on everything anyone tries to do to remedy it. It's really soul crushing to work on, I don't know why I still do it.
>Hugh
christ don't get me started

as an old NS player with probably close to 2000 hours or over, NS2 took way too fucking long to develop and was dead on arrival

Only Delta males didn't want to command.

I led my team to victory countless times.

>3 man fire-teams
>Staggered formation
>5 meter spread.
>Check those corners.
>Stay frosty.
>Protect those RTs with your lives.

you don't really attain either of those things and you fool nobody not even yourself

Because Exosuits and Onos make pubbing feel like grinding your balls on a cheese grater till they bleed and completely fuck the flow of the otherwise really well balanced game, at least back when I played it a few years ago.

never played ns2 but ns1 was the fucking shit back in the day. I pretty much failed high school because of this game.

is anyone still playing the original or is it completely dead now?

mixing FPS and RTS is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
they dont fucking mix at all

Exos got nerfed to the fucking ground. They're not very useful anymore

Onos however can now hold a button down to regenerate armor

It's completely dead, sadly. I spent so many days and nights on this game it's insane.

The problems at release are what really fucked the game. New players got completely burned out after 5min loading screens to get into games that were about to end, only to get another 5min loading screen.

I never played the first Natural Selection so I'm pretty much a normalfag when it comes to this game as far as veterans would be concerned, so my opinion probably isn't worth much; That being said, I would have played NS2 for years if Exosuits and Onos were just simply removed from the game.

When I played the game, they were the "No fun allowed" classes. Even the most casual of casuals could hop into an Exosuit or an Onos and the game was simply just won because they both took so much fucking damage that nothing short of a highly coordinated team could take them down (Which I understand implicitly was the fucking point but I can';t say that when I had like one person to play with and had to pub 90% of the time), and this is in the hands of a fucking casual, mind you. 100% of the matches I played might as well have been over as soon as one team gets a single one of these fucking things, so that screenshot I took and posted of 3 pre-nerf exos was the last match I ever played of NS2 before dropping it forever.

>tfw you will never go back to the days of playing Day of Defeat, Natural Selection and Starsiege Tribes

The game had a steady number of players post-release, so no, that wasn't the main issue. The main issue was what said. This completely killed the game.

>e-sports
Other than the Brood War gooks, I don't think I've ever seen e-sports not being cancer.

The Onos in NS2 is too powerful. In NS you had to be really good at playing Onos if you wanted to get anything done, since HMG or JP/SG marines could slap your shit pretty easily if you were careless. This is mostly why the best Alien players played Fade or Lerk over Onos.

Onos in 1.04 original NS was insane

that was my favorite version of the game even if it wasn't the most balanced, the teams were very asymmetrical and the labyrinthine maps were much more interesting RIP old ns_bast you were the best map ever made

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I've got a fond spot for 1.04, though I think 3.2 is the best version all around. I do agree that old bast is best bast. Love this fucking map.

Well that's the thing, like, fighting a skilled Fade or Lerk was a lot more exhilarating than fighting an Onos or an Exosuit.

You needed a steady hand, situational awareness, and a tight team to take them on, and whenever I died to them, even in the hands of autism tier players, it always felt fair. Never did I get this sensation with Onos and Exosuits. Not even once. Plus, I played on launch, so I had to deal with pubbing into matches 5 minutes in constantly into teams who have already fed enough of the enemy team to cure world hunger, so they already had like 4 top evolutions on the enemy team. So I was one of those people who dropped the game because of launch issues and what I percieved to be poor balance. I have to emphasize the phrase "What I percieved to be" because it was my first rodeo in a NS game and I'm not going to be that faggot who comes into a well established community and complain "OKAY THIS NEEDS TO BE CHANGED BECAUSE I'M TOO SUCH AND SUCH TO DEAL WITH IT", I'm just saying it's why I, and probably a lot of other people dropped the game. The esports faggotry just wiped out a lot of the veterans with the newbies, from what I understand.

hell yeah, bast and viaduct

it's been so long i don't remember my other favorites sadly

>I have to emphasize the phrase "What I percieved to be" because it was my first rodeo in a NS game and I'm not going to be that faggot who comes into a well established community and complain "OKAY THIS NEEDS TO BE CHANGED BECAUSE I'M TOO SUCH AND SUCH TO DEAL WITH IT", I'm just saying it's why I, and probably a lot of other people dropped the game. The esports faggotry just wiped out a lot of the veterans with the newbies, from what I understand.
Skill difference and the lack of matchmaking, much less the kind of sophisticated matchmaking NS2 requires, are the big problems here. There's such a vast difference in the playstyle, communication and overall behavior of someone at the floor versus the ceiling that it's like two completely different games, and that goes for marine play as well as alien play.

I don't fault Charlie for much because he's a super nice guy and an all-around great developer, but not getting a good matchmaking system in place at launch instead of dedicated servers was a fatal mistake. By the time everyone came around to the fact that NS2 needed matchmaking we'd lost too many players and a matchmaking algorithm wouldn't even work anymore because the playerbase is just too small.

The best we can do is try to make the hive team balance work as well as it can, and the people working on that have done a pretty good job. A lot of what's been done by the CDT in general (and now that they're hired people like to call them the "PDT" which personally I think just makes them sound like timezones) has been to un-fuck and generally fix a lot of the backend stuff that UWE rushed to be able to add features during the first year of the game but got increasingly more broken and made the game that much harder to maintain. We didn't even have a build machine to make new test builds for the game for months because the system had to be rebuilt from the ground up by one guy.

I enjoyed it a lot while I played it and it was really unique. The optimization was not so great though and the community was pretty elitist.

I never liked how they copypasted the Marine's Commander role to the Aliens. The whole point of Natural Selection was asymmetrical sides fighting against eachother.

this is probably the most illogical food analogy to be posted this year

Yes, I think the Alien commander was a real detriment to that aspect. The great thing about the Alien team in NS is that you had to be extremely coordinated and relay information accurately, with each team member filling vital roles (Gorges claiming RTs and building chambers, defensive Skulks protecting the Hive and RTs, offensive Skulks scouting, parasiting, killing Marines or chewing RTs). With someone in charge in NS2 this aspect took a huge slap in the face.

> you will never be a cute gorgie sliding around on the floor

That's the thing. The system wasn't even broke. Even if a was shitty Gorge, they would only use up their share of the resources.

>Even if a player was a shitty Gorge,

I was sure I typed that. Must be tired.

True, but res management was still important. But yeah I don't get why they changed that. Playing Aliens in NS is so much more interesting than in NS2. The whole infestation stuff with cysts also feels like a lazy way of keeping the Alien commander busy.

the only thing the creep and cysts did was tank peoples frame rate it should have fucked off in alpha like what we told them to do