Natural Selection 2

[TheFeniX]

Is there a thread for this game? I didn't see anything that wasn't years old. After pre-ordering many years ago, there's finally an official release. I haven't had a chance to really dive into the game, but I've played more than a few matches and managed not to make a total ass out of myself.

Stability is vastly improved over the build I played with about a year ago. The game isn't nearly as CPU intensive as it was and seems to make much better use of Video Card resources. Stability can wane at times though. I had one weird issue where, after spawning on the Infantry Portal, my PC shit it's FPS into oblivion. I had to F4 (quit to the server ready room) and rejoin the marine team. Quick fix to a strange problem. Also, the Windowed Fullscreen support is the best I've seen in a while. The game doesn't stutter at all when switching it in and out of focus unlike, say, Borderlands 2.

Graphically, the game doesn't blow you away, but it gets the job done and looks pretty clean. The UI could afford to be a little less muted and have important information stand out, but it's only a small complaint.

Playing Marine, as always, seems to be the best way to start out. While everything has it's blue tint, this isn't a major deal as the marine "areas" don't deal with a lot of clutter. Alien areas however (especially since everything has a yellow/orange tint) can get extremely confusing. Considering the camera for the two standard units (skulks and gorges) are very low to the ground (seemingly even lower than in NS1), this makes navigation in any area annoying and extremely bad in heavily alien infested areas. The alien "flashlight" serves to correct a lot of this, but I still find myself wanting more contrast.

The controls are pretty crisp although I can't understand why there isn't a "lastinv" button map. There still seems to be quite a few hit detection problems with melee attacks like the Marine Axe and the Lerk bite. But I haven't done enough playing to determine if this is all server side or with the game itself.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this game. As an aside, I'm stoked to be playing a game that doesn't throw me in a box and goad me with treats to keep playing. NS2 is just "play game, win/lose, play another game." There's no advancement and I'm ok with that. I can't comment on the balance yet as I've been playing mostly with pugs. I will say though that I've had good wins and losses with both races.

[Ziggy Stardust]

For a hot second I thought this thread was about a sequel to this incredibly old DOS game I used to play, "Unnatural Selection." Damn, I was kind of excited, too.

[Cykeisme]

At one point in the past, I played Natural Selection 1 excessively and greatly enjoyed playing Marines (both ordering people around and being ordered around).
What are the most striking differences in gameplay between the prequel and its modern successor, if any?


NS1 was a Half-Life mod, and thus free for everyone who had Half-Life, so I didn't have a problem with finding Asian servers before. Now, though, my biggest hurdle to just buying NS2 is that there might not be any players in Asia, and thus I won't be able to play with a decent ping.

[TheFeniX]

On the general front:
There are no longer set spawns/hive locations. NS2 maps (besides ported ones like NS_caged which was a great NS1 map and now a terrible NS2 map) usually have 5 spawn points that can be locked down (by either building a hive or command chair) to help expand a team's influence. Like NS1, aliens max out their advantage with 3 hives, marines max out at two CCs. All players on both teams now have access to Personal Resources for buying gear/upgraded lifeforms. Team Resources is given to both commanders (aliens now have a commander). Marines actually have more mobility than aliens in NS2 with a combination of phase gates, sprint, beacon with obs, along with aliens no longer having Movement Chambers function as hive teleports. I'm not big on this change. Bunnyhopping in gone. If you lose all your hives or CCs: you insta-lose which is a great way to break a turtle by onos rushing.

Aliens:
There are no "freebies" anymore. 2nd hive doesn't give leap, spores, or blink by default. The alien commander must research these from a hive. Aliens expand by the commander putting down Cysts which expand the Infestation. Nearly all alien structures must be built on Infestation/Creep. Cysts dieing will remove the creep and cause alien structures to bleed out and die. Chambers are split into two separate entities. One gives you upgrade like Carapace/Regeneration for Defense (Now called Crag, which can then be evolved by your team) and the other gives healing only for Crag.

Fades are no longer the mid-game Alien unit they were. They can still dominate in pub games, but 2-3 straight shooters will make them next to worthless. I think 2 lvl 1 shotgun blasts will allow you to finish a Capace Fade off with a pistol shot or two. UW is running into the same problems in NS2 that they did in NS1: trying to balance for pub play vs competitive play. The 5 minute Onos egg drop (alien commanders can upgrade eggs with res to allow players to quickly evolve into higher lifeforms without spending their own resources) are the standard in competitive play from what I've read.

Gorges are now a front-line support unit. They can used personal res to build Offense Chamber like structures for cheap that are easily killed. They are perfect for stalling and essential as a support unit.

Marines:
They lost HMGs and Heavy Armor and gained shotguns that are realistic (little spread at range) which basically makes them sniper rifles and extremely powerful if you can aim well. Even the LMG (by design) scales extremely well with Weapons 3. They can also build ARCs (combat NPCs) and MACs (welder/builder NPCs) controlled by the com. There are now exosuits instead of Heavy Armor. You get either a one gun + punch or dual mini-guns. The drawback is you cannot build, phase, be beaconed, or weld while in an exo.

Marines must now have power nodes up in an area in order for building (besides turrets) to work in a given area. Destroying the power node is a big deal as if it's powering the arms lab, all upgrades are lost until power is restored.

The game seems heavily weighted in favor of marines right now since the fade doesn't fit into any real roles. Skulks seem to be balanced around Carapace (because of how early you can get it) and they scale pitifully when compared to Marine upgrades. Marines base unit gets much stronger as the game goes on while alien units top out early and only deal more damage by spending resources to upgrade the lifeform. The problem with this is on a few angles: a marine who has died 10 times can still put out the damage once stepping off the Infantry Portal for 0 res. An Onos or Fade that dies will cost 50 to 75 res to put out the damage he was before dieing. Since aliens lost Focus (2x damage / .5 attack speed), they can't make this difference up on the cheap. The Alien's front-line unit (The Fade) now really serves no true role. It's too weak, even with max upgrades, to stand toe-to-toe with 2-3 upgraded marines and kill one. Hit and run doesn't work because Armories now weld armor (so, you don't have to waste 15 res outfitting 3 marines with welders) making slowly wearing down marines useless. Marines who can get two CCs up and lock them down with defense and hold onto 3-4 res nodes only lose due to carelessness as 20 PRes (buys you a shotgun) is the only real big cost you need to put out damage and they are recyclable if you die.

Two Onos at least (with gorge backup and a Lerk doesn't hurt for Umbra/Spores) is generally what's needed to break up a marine lock-down of just 4-5 marines with upgraded weapons. Meanwhile, Onos are tough, but go down extremely fast while under fire from 4 marines. And since alien mobility is low and Crag and gorges healing is so low, falling back to heal can literally have 2 marines sprinting and running down a celerity Onos. God forbid they have shotguns. I still win a lot of games as Alien Commander, but once players start learning how to shoot straight and work in groups, those victories are going to be few a far between.

[Cykeisme]

Sounds like under the surface, it's a very, very different game now!

It's understandable that there are balance issues (especially since the two sides are so disparate), but it's always an ongoing process. So do the developers put out constant version updates to tweak it? How frequent do they support the game with balance updates?
I guess this is a very important concern, in my opinion.

[TheFeniX]

The game still has the general feel of NS1, but the differences make it a different game. It's like comparing NS 1.4 to 3.0. Yea, it's the same basic game, but the gameplay and the strategies are completely different.

Updates are pretty constant, but they seem to be going the Blizzard route when it comes to balancing. Namely, they rely on huge buffs/nerfs rather than constant small tweaks to gameplay.

For instance, a previous version (I think the one right before release) had Fades as almost unstoppable death machines. Loads of HP and Armor, high damage output, and invulnerable while blinking. Right before release, they were hit with a large damage reduction (I've heard almost 50%), an almost 150 health/armor reduction, and blink no longer offers invulnerability. This cratered the fade in competitive play, but balanced it fairly well in pub play. But the pub play balance is mainly because pub/new marines rambo off alone and generally can't shoot for shit. I'm not all that great, but I can solo lack-luster Fades with a lvl 2 shotgun. Alternatively, I can wreck groups of uncoordinated marines as Fade.

Optimizations are coming along great. The feedback from the community has later builds constantly improving stability and performance. The game feels extremely solid. They just really need to work on UI and HUD issues. They are still extremely muted. And since alien structures have activated abilities (such as cyst being able to "rupture" for 1 res in order to obscure vision of marines), these structures need to stand out more to the commander while not being any easier to spot from the ground. The commander interface itself needs to be cleaned up. There's almost no feedback to the user. It's really noticeable when you've been spoiled by a game like Starcraft.

I personally like NS1 more than NS2 right now. I think they could have made NS2 more of NS1 4.0 and done about the same. NS 1.0-1.4 was a massively different game 2.0 and even 3.0. When NS1 finally started to die out, you could still find 1.4 servers because some people just liked the game better. Right now, NS2 feels like NS4.0 but trying desperately to convince you it's a sequel.

All that said, NS2 is definitely worth $25 and I'll be playing it for quite sometime. I owed UW money anyway since I played NS1 for over 4 years which saved me loads of money I would have spent on other games.

[Exonerate]

I played NS1 religiously for years and at a competitive level, so my impressions are admittedly tainted by that. Had I known what NS2 would look like, I wouldn't have shelled out the $40. I know I seem very dissatisfied, but it's only because I had very high expectations - if you're a more casual player, chances are you'll be pretty happy. I'll try not to touch upon game balance since that'll change in the future and stick to gameplay fundamentals. With that in mind:

Performance still needs improvement. My 2500k @ 4.3 Ghz still struggles to maintain a smooth and responsive framerate. During the Alpha fanboys were saying performance would be fixed by the Beta and during the Beta they were saying it would be fixed by release. They actually did put out a patch right before public release that significantly improved performance, but I still consider it deficient. Maybe they'll work another miracle in the future, we'll see. The engine was literally written by a single person, so I'll give them some slack.

Ammo and energy levels are small and hard to see. If you try to connect to a server but fail, you have to open up the server browser and wait for it to reload everything all over again. Even worse, refreshing servers can overload my router and disconnect me. I wish the developers should pay more attention to these things because they're niggling problems that are all easy to fix but when taken together really eat into the experience.

Skulk movement needs improvement. Hell, all movement needs improvement. Everything feels like it's moving in molasses. Personally, I thought wall hopping and bunny hopping in NS1 was perfect, but UWE decided it was too unintuitive. Instead, they've come up with this new wall hopping mechanic where you jump off walls at a certain angle to gain speed and keep mashing space bar as you hit the ground to maintain it. It's not obvious to me this is any more intuitive than what it was supposed to replace. At the same time, they've given Marines sprint (Which some players have unhappily pointed out is just slightly slower than a running Skulk) but completely nerfed their ability to move backwards and dodge by jumping.

Sound is muffled. Everything sounds like a heavily carpeted room and it's hard to tell what direction a sound is coming from or even what it's supposed to be. For a game so dependent on flanking and ambushing, this is pretty big.

Not too happy about the power grid/infestation mechanism. I guess Flayra added it in to solidify the concept of map control, but it comes at the detriment of a more dynamic game. Now pushing through Alien territory is always a slog - no more quick surprise rushes or ninja phase gates.

Don't like the Alien commander. There used to be a clear difference between Marines and Aliens - Marines had a top-down structure where a single commander dropped equipment and buildings while Aliens had a decentralized one where individuals would go Gorge and build whatever they wanted. Now the defining difference between the two teams is ranged vs melee, especially now that Marines get personal resources instead of having to rely on the commander spending the team resource pool. I'm not sure why this was added in at all, Flayra seems to get these ideas in his head that don't really have backing behind it other than "Hey, this seems like a cool thing to do!"

Lots of visual clutter. I can't even keep track of the number of things Aliens can do that obfuscate your view, never mind the various visual effects from other sources.

Cyke: I got a Steam friend in Malaysia who plays, so I assume there are at least some servers available in Asia.

[TheFeniX]

I've always had a love/hate relationship with Bunnyhopping. Yea, it was cool flying through corridors like a rocket as skulk or finally getting down the ability to bunnyhop with blink and quickly switch to metabolize to heal my Fade back to full for my next onslaught while never losing a step. That shit quickly feels as overpowered as it is when you realize many other players just can't master bunnyhopping or don't have their timings down to round corners with it.

But seeing a bunch of marines pogo hoping down hallways like morons always left a bad taste in my mouth. When they removed BHing for Marines, you then got to constantly be outrun by a BHing Adrenaline Gorge. It got old. They should have just upped the movement speed of the skulk if they wanted to go that route. They ran into issues when they started balancing around BHing.

I agree with many of your points. I do find it strange though you're having so many performance issues. The game ran like a brick before release, but now I have no issues keeping up 60 fps.

[Cykeisme]

Hmm, sounds like it's something that I might want to pick up if it improves, but not at the moment.

Exonerate, how'd you know I was from Malaysia? Or just coincidence that your Steam friend is from Malaysia, too?

[Exonerate]

I think a big part of the problem was that bunnyhopping was an undocumented feature and wasn't something you could really figure out by yourself. You pretty much had to see somebody else do it, look up a tutorial for it, and practice it. I don't buy the argument that many players are incapable of learning it - everybody I know who put the time into learning it succeeded. Accessibility was the only problem and that could've been solved by in-game tutorials and game control improvements, such as jumping on contact with the ground if spacebar is held down. The core mechanic of air strafing to gain speed was very flexible and elegant. I can see why some people don't like it, but in a game with fast-moving Fades and Lerks and leap for Skulks, it never struck me as being out-of-place. It's unfortunately the term brings out an negative kneejerk reaction for many players who don't even know what it is. I was just joking to a friend the other day that Flayra should just implement bunnyhopping but give it another name and most of the opposition would dissolve.

As for performance, my main gripe is how it feels. I can run it at a framerate that would be perfectly fine for a movie, but it's the sluggish reaction to input that kills it for me. In the beginning of the game it's tolerable, but as the world is populated by more and more entities, responsiveness drops like a rock.

Cyke: I didn't know you were from Malaysia, just a big coincidence!

[TheFeniX]

I think a big part of the problem was that bunnyhopping was an undocumented feature and wasn't something you could really figure out by yourself. You pretty much had to see somebody else do it, look up a tutorial for it, and practice it. I don't buy the argument that many players are incapable of learning it - everybody I know who put the time into learning it succeeded.

While I could have done better explaining what I meant, you've basically shown why most people can't/won't master it. It's a skill learned completely outside the context of the main game. I had to sit down on a listen server to practice it for NS1, essentially not playing the game, to get it down. Unless your timing was excellent, you also had to run a +jump macro to time it for you or use mwheel.

My big issue is that a lot of NS players who knew how to bunnyhop were so fucking stingy with the information. I was verbally chastised on a few servers for saying "here's the basics, but you'll likely need X and Y to get it down" for handing out information that gave "noobs" access to their secret club or some shit, like they were all practicing magicians. That ends up coloring your perceptions a bit. On pubs, I never even really bothered with it because it just wasn't needed as you can ambush pub marines all day long. This would almost always lead to hilarious shit like "lol walker skulk thinks hes good cuz he killed me." I'd walk 3+ marines down all day while Fade and get the same response.

Accessibility was the only problem and that could've been solved by in-game tutorials and game control improvements, such as jumping on contact with the ground if spacebar is held down. The core mechanic of air strafing to gain speed was very flexible and elegant.

I wish I could find the thread, but it's been years. There was a topic on the offcial forms about this which lead to a huge "don't teach noobs things" blow-back from all the 1337 pro players when posters were mentioning some kind of tutorial for bhoping. But really, my only beef at the end (because assholes are always going to be assholes) was that marines lost BHing, but Gorges kept it and could outrun marines all day long without celerity. I like the NS2 solution: Gorge Slide is fucking awesome.

As for performance, my main gripe is how it feels. I can run it at a framerate that would be perfectly fine for a movie, but it's the sluggish reaction to input that kills it for me. In the beginning of the game it's tolerable, but as the world is populated by more and more entities, responsiveness drops like a rock.

Is this a local performance loss or on particular servers? Right now, our server is having massive tickrate drops as the game goes on. I'm assuming it's due to just how many entities the server is tracking as the game builds up. I have no issues performance-wise even if everything else starts teleporting. The dedicated server needs work, however since I'm not admining this server, I can't even begin to understand what the problem is.

[Exonerate]

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience. For what it's worth, all the players I knew were happy to teach anybody who asked... not that many people asked. Since you're talking when Marines still had bhop, this would indeed be a very long time ago. I don't think giving Gorges mobility was was too bad, it's perfectly in line with how every other lifeform could choose to engage or disengage, unless they were surrounded or caught out of position. I honestly haven't noticed Gorge slide making much of a difference at all. Probably a gimmick they made so they could sell more Gorge merchandise later

Local performance loss. Nothing to be done besides waiting for more optimizations or getting a better CPU.

[TheFeniX]

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience. For what it's worth, all the players I knew were happy to teach anybody who asked... not that many people asked. Since you're talking when Marines still had bhop, this would indeed be a very long time ago.

Nothing to apologize about really. There's a lot to learn in NS since it's pretty different from any other FPS I've played and the RTS elements sure don't make it any easier. New players get deluged with all this information, then need to learn bunnyhopping on top of that to really round out their game. And the 1337-kiddos are such fucking dicks about the whole thing. I've played on numerous servers where walking 5 feet as skulk or fade and killing a Marine would lead to hilarious All Say bullshit. Have the gall to ask what BHing is? Oh man, get ready for the shitstorm. And really, unless you're into the competitive scene, BHing is just not that important. But I've seen consties and competitive scene guys shit all over any poster who mentions bunnyhopping in any kind of a bad light on the official forums. They take that shit personally.

I don't think giving Gorges mobility was was too bad, it's perfectly in line with how every other lifeform could choose to engage or disengage, unless they were surrounded or caught out of position. I honestly haven't noticed Gorge slide making much of a difference at all. Probably a gimmick they made so they could sell more Gorge merchandise later

"Protect the fatty" was a big deal back in 1.4 (or was it 1.04...). Losing the Gorge was a major blow to the alien team. It started to lose it's importance later on, but scoring a Gorge kill was always a blow to the alien team unless they caught one after it had spent all it's res. I never liked how, sans celerity, a gorge could outrun a marine. The gorge should generally need to be escorted.

Local performance loss. Nothing to be done besides waiting for more optimizations or getting a better CPU.

That sucks. However, for the first time (besides the one hiccup I mentioned earlier in the thread), I was having some weird issues with NS2 last night. Graphics tearing on Caged was insane. I had fully textured "walls" literally stretching across multiple segments of the map seriously hindering my vision. FPS was dropping into Oblivion. I had one NS2 lockup. And when I typed "quit" into the console to end my night playing, NS2 closed and hard-locked my PC. I was not amused as the last game to do this was SWTOR.

[Cykeisme]

Elitist players tend to be morons who don't realize that putting up unassailable barriers to entry will kill their community. I particularly enjoyed TheFeniX analogizing their attitude to practicing magicians out to protect their secrets.
It's interesting that bunnyhopping was very common knowledge even earlier on in the Counter-Strike community, but a lot of server admins actually made bunnyhopping a bannable offense, at least on the Asian servers I played on. The interesting thing is, for some reason, that made everyone eager to teach it to everyone else, like it's some underground rebel shit that they had to spread. Like, with Guy Fawkes masks on, or something.

So generally, in that respect, I think that removing it and simply adding a Sprint key is a positive change in NS2.

Anyway, with all the F2P stuff around (like Planetside 2, that I'm planning to try soon), I'm not sure how NS2 is going to really sell, unless it works out its issues (both game balance and technical).