I honestly can’t believe that Natural Selection 2, the asymmetrical alien versus human multiplayer game released in 2012, is still getting updated. This was my main multiplayer game for at least a year, and I recently got back into it and was surprised to see it still gets updates thanks to a community development team.
So whats in this new patch?
A lot actually! This new update to NS2 includes a new map, changes to existing maps, new skins, new models, new sounds and new gameplay and balance changes. All told the changelog for build 327 came to be 10+ pages once we included everything. There is so much in this update to sink your teeth into, read ahead for all the details or just jump in game and figure out all the changes in battle. People playing on the new map Unearthed will receive a new alien commander skin and if you like that you might also check out our Catalyst DLC Pack, which has many other skins and now includes a new Sandstorm skin for the updated machine gun model. Remember all sales of NS2 and DLC directly affect our development budget and allow our team to continue work on NS2.
Check out the full changelog below to see all the goodies contained within.
Follow the NS2 development roadmap to see our plans for future updates.
This is actually pretty old, but I realized that I never made a post about it. Adam Sessler serves as host for OtherSide Entertainment and guests including Ken Levine while they play and discuss System Shock 2. There is a lot of great anecdotes around the design and development of the game, but unfortunately the audio quality is all over the place. Someone really should create a KickStarter to replace Adam’s dollar store microphone. At least Paul Neurath and Ken Levine sound good.
Starsiege: Tribes quietly turned 20 years old back in November. It seems a lot of people don’t really remember the game or the major impact it had on multiplayer shooter designs, but Ben Lindbergh over at The Ringer wrote an excellent article about it. It is all part of their series highlighting some legendary games from 1998 including Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid, and Ocarina of Time. They are calling 1998 the “best year ever for video games”, and I maybe have to agree with them. The only other year that comes close in terms of big influential releases in my opinion is 2004. Anyway, the article is a great look back on the game and its influence. From the article:
At E3 in Atlanta in the spring of 1998, a newly announced game named Starsiege: Tribes took aim at the whole history of first-person shooters, a burgeoning genre whose hallmarks had crystallized quickly.
In front of a large convention crowd, lead designer Scott Youngblood led a live demo that introduced the PC title to the public. “It started off running around an interior that looked just as good as Quake,” he recalls. “And then [I] go out to the exterior and they see this huge terrain, and then [I] just jump off and then jet-pack to the ground. Like, ‘Holy crap.’ They’ve never seen anything like that.”
“It blew people’s minds,” remembers lead software engineer Mark Frohnmayer. “He was running around like, ‘Oh, yeah, first-person shooter,’ and then all of a sudden rounds the corner and there is this huge terrain in the distance and he runs out there with a jet pack on. Like, ‘What the fuck.’”
In the era of Destiny, Battlefield, Far Cry, and Fortnite, it’s difficult to grasp how limitless Starsiege: Tribes would have looked to the E3 audience only a year after Quake — Id Software’s gloomy, Gothic, muddy-looking successor to Doom — became widely available on Windows. “Now it would be totally normal,” Frohnmayer says. “But back then it was the first time that you really had a high-fidelity interior environment and a high-fidelity terrain environment, and they blended seamlessly.” In a preview posted after E3, Gamespot raved that Tribes “renders scenes with sharp backdrops for miles” and, with appropriate awe, reported, “Instead of waiting … to load a massive outdoor map, the game just moves along without pause.”
Ask developers and players alike to reminisce about Starsiege: Tribes, which turned 20 on November 30, and those three words — “the first time” — form a frequent refrain. Much of Starsiege: Tribes seemed so far in advance of its own time that two decades later, it’s still similar in concept to contemporary titles.
Tribes didn’t just anticipate later trends. It also played an important part in popularizing them. By earning critical kudos, cultivating an active online community that persists today, and demonstrating that the previously undone was doable, Tribes influenced future developers even without being a massive seller. Before such features were standard fare for first-person shooters, it boasted a sophisticated character class system; an emphasis on teamwork, coordination, and team objectives rather than gleeful fragging alone; player-controlled single-person and team-oriented vehicles; a major publisher green-lighting a multiplayer-only release; and ingenious network code that supported an unprecedented number of players amid massive indoor-outdoor environments, in an era when most players were still stuck with dial-up connections. And, maybe most memorably, it offered a degree of verticality and freedom of movement that’s rarely been replicated.
The Resident Evil 2 “1-Shot Demo” was released the other day, and I finally had some time to sit down and check it out. Its called the “1-Shot Demo” because you only get to play it for 30 minutes, which is enough time to finish it as long as you don’t sight see too much. I managed to finish the demo in a little over 20 minutes, and I have to say I really like what they have done. I played Resident Evil 2 multiple times through back in the day, and I was worried that there would not be a lot of new stuff to see here besides a fresh coat of paint. Based on what I was able to see, the police station was greatly expanded on, and I kept running into new puzzles and gameplay mechanics. If the whole game has been expanded on in this way then I think it is going to turn out to be pretty awesome. The link to download the demo is below (the demo is no longer available), and you can check out some of the screenshots I took as well. If after playing the demo you want to pre-purchase the game, Green Man Gaming is currently selling it for up to 26% off.
