Natural Selection 2, the FPS with strategy elements has a fresh release out and they've published a roadmap towards a big 2.0 release.
Update 324 "CATALYST" was released today, along with news that they've officially pulled in another programmer to help push it forwards. As for the new release, it includes a bunch of overall balance tweaks as well as some sound improvements. They also released a new "Catalyst Pack" DLC to help fund future development, which includes news skins with more to be added. All this is in preparation for them gearing up towards a big 2.0 release with tons of planned tweaks.
On their roadmap, they're working towards a friends system to join games together, a clearer main menu, a clearer map, new maps, improved bot support and quite a lot more. It sounds like they have some pretty good plans for the game, so I hope they're able to rejuvenate it.
The game needs you to manually install libsndio, an issue which has been known about since last year so it's sad to see the developer still not include the dependencies needed. To grab it on Ubuntu, run this:
sudo apt install libsndio6.1
I imagine a fair few people will already have it, as a number of other games and applications outside of Steam use it too. I've sent them a message to remind them this still hasn't been done after around a year. They also need to fix the Steam Overlay, which doesn't currently work in the Linux version. Both quite minor issues, but still need sorting.
I had a bit of a blast on it earlier and it did bring back some good memories, I used to absolutely adore the game. It actually runs a lot better than it used to, very smooth now.
You can get a copy on Humble Store and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: gigasmackI loved playing NS2, however I found that the community was quite toxic. Even when playing on servers marked as "Learning" servers, you had those asshats that just couldn't deal with you not knowing how to play perfectly. Maybe it's different now. I'll be sure to give it another shot.The game I was in for a while today had a guy who moaned once, then he suddenly completely changed and ended up just telling people what to do, was quite nice actually.
ElectricPrism Sep 5, 2018
Quoting: GuestI feel this game has been so under-rated over the years
Loved the original natural selection and also love natural selection 2, it always irked me they never became as big as something like counter-strike because NS is fantastic and not THAT hard to understand how to play once you get the general gist of everything
In hindsight I think that the game was extremely CPU and GPU hungry and this probably was one of the "setbacks" to it becoming "widely popular".
IIRC One time I loaded the game and it took 2 or 3 minuets to update the map data file to the new layout just so I could play the game. (I can't recall if I was still on spinning disk 7200 RPM or SSD at that point), on a Laptop that would be painful. (It was prior to getting to the title screen, I would have appreciated being able to move around the menus and options while it did it in the background.)
I remember having a $400 GPU and cranking the settings up as high as possible and I couldn't get a crazy frame-rate, I had choppy issues on my i7.
Look at games who do the opposite -- Minecraft and Terraria will run on a potatoe. Or rather, any laptop lying around even if it has a shitty Intel GPU. (We all know Intel is awesome and stable as fuck but for gaming doesn't deliver much on the GPU juice.)
Also, being a "for-profit" game and not free-to-play, I honestly think they could explode if it was Free to Play and they borrowed a page from DOTA 2 TI Championships.
This year alone IIUC DOTA2 raked in 100 million dollars, 25 million of which when to the prize pool, 11 million of which went to the #1 champion team.
Not including profits from skin purchases and other things. They essentially have added a RPG circle to their game to get players to complete compedium books, challenges and other things to win prizes.
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 5 September 2018 at 6:27 pm UTC
Is this game dead ?
The steam charts mark the top number of players this week at 368
Quoting: razing32Hmm.
Is this game dead ?
The steam charts mark the top number of players this week at 368
The player count has been around 400 for years now, and it still is not dead. There even still is a competitive league.
But before you consider buying it, be careful. As Liam mentioned, the devs have practically stopped support for Linux. The libsndio is a thing you can fix by yourself. But at the moment the Steam overlay is not working, and although the devs know about this, they don't even list it under known issues.
Last edited by mock²³ on 5 September 2018 at 8:05 pm UTC
Quoting: mock²³Quoting: razing32Hmm.
Is this game dead ?
The steam charts mark the top number of players this week at 368
The player count has been around 400 for years now, and it still is not dead. There even still is a competitive league.
But before you consider buying it, be careful. As Liam mentioned, the devs have practically stopped support for Linux. The libsndio is a thing you can fix by yourself. But at the moment the Steam overlay is not working, and although the devs know about this, they don't even list it under known issues.
Thanks for the heads up.
Think i have it from a bundle or a friend.
Probably made some rookie mistakes but nobody was raging at me about it.
Performance has improved a lot, previously it just kept crashing whenever graphics were turned up.
Will have to purchase DLC.
Last edited by jo3fis on 6 September 2018 at 9:11 am UTC
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