NATURAL SELECTION 2

[CHURCHMOUTH]

Hello all you boys and girls i'd like to take you to the inside world. Quite an irregular place to be, but never fear yourselves with me...

Lookin' to start up and NS2 clan/team. So far i have no members and i realize this is a long shot but i'd like to fill my roster with people who have fortress/tfc backgrounds.

Reply to this thread if you are interested even the slightest bit, there are no requirements for this team besides the fact that you need to own the NS2 BETA, which is about 30 bucks.

Looking forward to hearing from some of you guys!

Thanks.

[Lost]

I've been interested in this since way back when. How's it play?

[CHURCHMOUTH]

Until the most recent patch, unless and in some cases even if you had a top end computer it was terrible as far as framerate and gameplay were concerned. Beta Build 194 which also included some huge things as far as game mechanics were concerned (Onos, jetpack, new maps) also brought major updates to the overall smoothness of the game. I have a pretty outdated rig and im getting 60 fps with dips. I think the game plays pretty good considering they are still working on it and releasing new builds weekly.

[AfterShock]

I'm amazed at how long they can take to make 1 game, considering a lot is just building on the ideas of NS1. How longs it been in development now? 6 years? :/

[CHURCHMOUTH]

im really not sure how long its been in development for.. what surprises me is the fact that they release new things literally every week, and they have been doing so for a long time.

[Ricey]

Originally Posted by AfterShock

I'm amazed at how long they can take to make 1 game, considering a lot is just building on the ideas of NS1. How longs it been in development now? 6 years? :/

Yea, just about 6 years. At first they were doing a build on Source, then scrapped it and built their own engine.

I've fooled around a bit, but I doubt i'll go into tournys with this game, unless HAM, #CRI, or Xen guys come back.

[KubeDawg]

Originally Posted by AfterShock

I'm amazed at how long they can take to make FF, considering a lot is just building on the ideas of TFC. How longs it been in development now? 6 years? :/

Fixed it for ya

[AfterShock]

Well they have a fulltime set of employees, working all week on one game

Also FF was released after about 2 years, maybe less :P

[Raynian]

I take back pretty much everything I've said about this. The past few patches have essentially turned this game into shit. It's sad that something that was so fun turned into crap. It's as though they wanted to start creating a game that looked and felt like an AAA title...when that's not what NS2 should be.

[oaties]

Originally Posted by Raynian

I take back pretty much everything I've said about this. The past few patches have essentially turned this game into shit. It's sad that something that was so fun turned into crap. It's as though they wanted to start creating a game that looked and felt like an AAA title...when that's not what NS2 should be.

Mind elaborating on this? I've heard nothing but praise from a few FF players and was considering trying it out.

[Raynian]

The HUD went from being minimalistic, but clean and easy to determine necessary information...to being a cluttered mess that's difficult to understand. Text scrolls onto your screen rather than just quickly popping up, the font is ugly compared to what it was before, the minimap zooming around constantly is distracting, it's impossible to distinguish friend from foe on the minimap (they both look the same and blink red when under attack), it's impossible to see how much health someone has now (you just get a rough indication), non-comms are barraged with information that they don't need to really know, since it's the comm's job to keep them in the loop, etc. This isn't even stuff that you can say "get used to it" about - it's just, in my opinion, completely worse than before in every way. Yeah, things like moving around health bar locations on the HUD I can get used to, but why would you make the health bar take up twice as much space as before when it was small, clean, and easy to quickly read before?

Gameplay is feeling incredibly stale. "Unhinging" alien lifeforms from hive count was an awful idea. To counter that, they had to severely nerf what the upper-tier lifeforms can do to compensate until they get upgrades. The new alien comm system sucks, much in the same reason that SC2's general macro principles suck. Rather than the simplistic, but concrete, values of build time, health, and utility (such as in SC1), they add shit in like Catalyze which is a boring "macro sink" that also conveniently fucks balance nine ways to Sunday. Also, they pretty much nerfed every single alien lifeform and buffed the fuck out of marines, so just about every game that's not horribly stacked ends in a marine victory once they get arcs. Oh, and there's lots of stupid bullshit they keep adding as well. Cloak? When has cloak ever been a fun game mechanic? At least in FF, you balance it out with slower movement speed, but point is - it's boring to play against, boring to play with, and slows down gameplay immensely. Silence? Ugh. Now marines can't rely on their hearing at all - fucking stupid.

Upgrades like carapace and the now-removed frenzy might be "stronger" in some respects, but they don't change the core interactions -- Marine hears or sees an alien, shoots it until it dies or he dies, the end. With cloak, you can't even walk out of base without your comm scanning for you or you risk dying because cloak is bullshit. Audio cues have always been immensely important in any FPS, but especially NS - having the ability to silence an alien's movements and attacks is, again, fucking retarded.

They're trying to "diversify" the gameplay too much, but in reality all they're doing is killing the reasons why it was fun in the first place -- a game that rewarded mechanic and tactical prowess.