Natural Selection 2 adds a new map and smarter bots

Quoting: GuestPlayed it last week after having had the game on hold for a longt time. Multiple crashes in addition to new bugs (like flickering UI/map, freeze of keyboard controls). Opengl-drivers for linux is still listed as "beta" in the game option, and this shows. Got so frustrated that I uninstalled the game.

Same old story then, what a damn shame.

Works very well after changing some graphics settings...Quality texture


Last edited by echazarenc on 7 June 2016 at 8:05 pm UTC

Yeah, the first step might be turning everything to minimal settings. I haven't got crashes for a long time and I'm playing 1-2 hours daily. The OpenGL renderer is unlikely to leave beta, however. Think the Dying Light port, divide by ten, you'll get the approximate amount of efforts made to improve it. They're focused on the gameplay changes now, it's awesome that the Linux version still isn't broken completely (for me at least). Recently they've broken the HLSL shader for Alien Vision on Linux and I had to fix it by myself, my fix was released the next week with the next update.

The game requires a lot of learning and it's not like you'd be able to enjoy it playing just on weekends for a couple of hours. You need to learn all the time, listen to the team and warn about the incoming enemies. Without strong teamwork it's a waste of time and you lose in the end. Organised rushes can sometimes turn the tides and allow for comebacks even when the game is seemingly lost.

There are rookie-only servers where one can train peacefully and not get rekt by vets constantly. I suggest to play at least 40-50 hours there, real gameplay hours (by Hive), not just the Steam ones. Only then you'll start to grasp the game a bit but never go comm on non-rookie servers until you have at least 100 Hive hours, you'll inevitably screw up the game for everyone in your team and will be blamed a lot.

If you're not prepared to invest this much time I'm afraid there's no point to even start, especially if you're not interested in the genre. Either you get hooked up or you drop it, that's the nature of competitive games. It pays off greatly though when you master it, I have 1788 hours by Steam and nearly 1000 hours by Hive (total rounds time).

Sure, give it a try. I don't know about stability but if you have a stuck keys issue there's a solution. AFAICT, crashes happen because the game runs out of the address space and that happens because of textures and no, lot of VRAM won't help you with that and also no, lot of RAM doesn't help either. Lower everything, if it runs ok despite looking like crap, you're fine. Start turning things back on. If you want to play competitively I'd suggest to turn off all the fancy effects anyway. They obscure the view and tank FPS.

To be honest its always run well for me, First few patches after initial release was sketchy though. Theres no slowdowns/graphic probs that I've encountered.

Not tried since this last patch yet

I've always felt that this game's most interesting aspect was its biggest downfall, and that is the RTS element. I also feel they missed out on giving this game a scary atmosphere, and everything feels bullet spongy which I dislike.

I used to have horendous lag and major wait times converting content to new formats - maybe now that I got a new CPU it wont be so bad but I'm not sure if I can play it on my Skylake as I moved my GTX 970 into my Steam Machine.

Hmm... I hope its good.

Works fine for me, love this game. Cant wait to try out the new map, just waiting for the 1080 to arrive.

I always got constant crashes until I turned all the texture settings down.

I also get this strange problem where my character keeps moving for a few seconds after I stop. Couldn't find a fix for that which made it impossible to play properly and extremely frustrating. I have not tried it for quite a while.

Every update I look for updates for the linux client or bug fixes but there never seem to be any.

So, NS2 is basically the main game I play these days as I love the FPS + RTS blend. Actually, for me on my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS laptop, I rarely have any crashes. I really have no complaints regarding the video/sound performance of NS2 like I used to about a year or so ago. Also, for those new to the game, you'll feel lost/noobish for the first month. But, stick with it as it gets more fun when you understand everything more clearly. Anyways, just my two cents.