
Natural Selection 2 pits alien against human in an action-packed struggle for survival. Wield devastating weaponry as a Frontiesman marine, or become the xenomorph as a deadly. Kharaa life-form.

Strategy Meets Shooter
Natural Selection 2 is a First Person Shooter and Real Time Stategy game rolled into one! Each team, alien and human, has a Commander. The Commander looks down on the battlefield and issues orders, places structures, collects resources, researches technology, and deploys abilities.

Here are some gameplay examples: A human Commander could drop health packs and ammunition to a trapped marine squad, and deploy sentry guns to help them defend their position. Or an alien Commander could grow a new Hive to spread infestation throughout newly captured territory, allowing more alien eggs to spawn...

Two Unique Sides
Aliens players choose to evolve into one of five lifeforms: The fast, fearsome Skulk can run on walls and deliver massive damage with is jaws. Lerks fly and deploy gasses to support their teammates in battle. Gorges heal other lifeforms and build tunnels, hydra turrets, walls, and other tactical structures. Fades blink in and out of battle, picking off marines with giant scythes. Finally, the giant Onos is so massive and so tough, that even entire marine squads can't take it down.

Marines wield rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, pistols, and other weapons. Cluster grenades can clear ventilation shafts of sneaky Skulks, flamethrowers make short work of alien structures and infestation, and boosts dropped by the Commander increase combat effectiveness.
When attacking on foot doesn't cut it, marines can construct hulking Exosuits wielding miniguns and railguns, and equip jetpacks for high speed assaults on alien Hives.

Long Term Development
Natural Selection 2 receives constant updates. This year, 2016, Unknown Worlds continues to develop new features, content, and improvements.

Mod Tools Come Standard
Natural Selection 2 comes with all the tools we used to make the game. All game code is open source. That means you can create, and play, an endless variety of mods. Publish, share, and download mods from the Steam Workshop, and automatically download mods when you join modded games.

Digital Deluxe Edition
Digital Deluxe Edition includes:
- Official Soundtrack - 1 hour of tribal, industrial music composed by David John and Simon Chylinski
- Digital Art Book - 40+ pages of art by Cory Strader, including environments, creatures, weapons and more
- Exclusive in-game marine model - Exclusive in-game marine model - A new marine model with custom visor and armor plating
- Exclusive Wallpapers and Avatars - Unique views of the NS2 universe by Amanda Diaz
"Twas the night before Gorgemas
when all through the base,
Not a creature was stirring
not even a MAC;
The Hydras were placed
by the Command Station with care,
In hopes that Saint Gorgie, soon would be there..."
Tis the season of gift giving and holiday cheer, so with that in mind we bring you Update 320. We’ve got some balance tweaks, visual improvements, and stability fixes for you this season. A huge thanks to Katzenfleisch for his many contributions this patch!
We’d like the take a moment and address some of the mod/client/server issues that started this week. Earlier this week Valve pushed out an update on the way clients access and use the version of workshop NS2 utilizes. As a result NS2 clients and servers can no longer access the workshop content. Thanks to some coding magic by Ghoul and McGlaspie, we have a temporary fix that will be released with Update 320, please be aware that some users may experience slightly longer load times as a result of this workaround (the more mods the longer it will take). We want to stress that this is a temporary fix and that server operators have been encouraged to setup mod backup servers to help keep games going if we continue to run into issues.
Our team is in communication with Valve and working to find a long term solution to the issue and we will be posting more in the next couple weeks as we figure out just what that permanent fix is going to be.
We hope you enjoy your holidays and stay tuned for more to come.
Merry Gorgemas!
Changelog
Gameplay
- Exosuits - Based on resounding community feedback, these are temporary interim changes to slightly nerf Exos, to allow us time to redesign them entirely through proper testing in following updates.
[list] - Increased purchase costs to 55 pres (from 45)
[list] - So marines can’t get them too early into the round and to make buying an Exo a significant investment again, as well as potentially limiting the ability to just re-purchase after a quick death.[/*]
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Tweaks / Improvements
- Optimized the update routine for unit status HUD elements: [list]
- Health and armor bars of targeted units now update instantly.[/*]
- Removed the annoying pulsate effect of the repair icons.[/*]
Fixes
- Fixed client/server crash when checking file(s) consistency from multiple threads.[/*]
- Fixed client crash with texture streaming when resetting render device or closing client.[/*]
- Fixed client crash with sound system when device is reset or client closes.[/*]
- Fixed client crash during physics update when collision objects were create or read from multiple threads.[/*]
- Fixed client crash where in some rare cases, starting a listen server with a mod enabled that had model resource content would crash when loading a map.[/*]
- Fixed that the curl multi interface doesn't exit when the easy interface times out and thus the given network connection is never closed. Based on the number of players connecting this can cause a server's network interface to overload / show redplugs. [list]
- This was a major issue that we discovered when Hive temporarily went down, and while Hive’s issue was permanently fixed, we wanted to doubly ensure it could not negatively affect servers going forward.[/*]
Fixed that the lights flickered when a destroyed/unsocketed/blueprint Power Node was attacked by Aliens, or when any Powernode state was attacked by Marines. (Contributed by Nin).[/*] [/*]
Maps
All maps have been updated to better utilize the glow toggling effect (when power is destroyed). As a result, the auxiliary power will now be more visually uniform. Some additional changes were added to toggle objects like holograms on/off when the power goes out.
Changes contributed by Zavaro:
Tram
- Fixed stuck spots in Repair around the tech point[/*]
- Added missing occlusion to southern Repair entrance[/*]
- Fixed occlusion issue in east vent in Ore[/*]
- Added more robust collision geometry in east vent in Ore to prevent stuck spots[/*]
- Fixed lighting issues in North Tunnels[/*]
- Removed two invulnerable Gorge locations in Conduit (NE and SE corners of the room)[/*]
- Added method for Marines to jump into Chasm-Containment vent[/*]
- Fixed stuck spot on stairs north of Flow Control[/*]
- Fixed spots around Exchange where cysts could be placed inside pipes[/*]
- Removed invulnerable Gorge location in Stability above the vent[/*]
- Fixed stuck spot in Fluid Transfer[/*]
- Fixed unaligned props near Repair Room[/*]
- Fixed hole in Deposit’s moving crates that allowed players to exit the map[/*]
- Note to Mappers: ALL CUSTOM MAPS MUST BE UPDATED FOR THE MAP TO BE ACCURATE! Before re-rendering the mini-map for your level, open the level in the editor, and re-save it. Otherwise, the newly generated mini-map will not line up correctly with the in-game icons.[/*]
- Material files used as layered effects (eg the distortion material used for cloaked aliens) can now use "%inherit" as a texture name, meaning it will use the base material's texture in its place. As a result, cloaked aliens now appear more detailed, since the normal map can now be used. Before, only the vertex normals were available for generating the distortion map.[/*]
- There is a new “Emissive matches power” drop-down option for level-props. By default this option is set to true. All level Models (props) used by the game can now potentially be affected by a Location’s power-state. The emissive channel in said model’s materials is toggled off when there is no power or the auxiliary lights are active. Mappers have control over which props are affected at run-time. In order for this to be applied to a map, it simply needs to be open and re-saved. To control the effect mappers will need to selectively choose which props are excluded from being changed by a location’s power.[/*]
- Added a new option to the texture tool that will cause it to attempt to align textures by their seams when copying the texture from one face to an adjacent on.[/*]
- Added options for prop placement, including align-to-surface, and randomize
otation.[/*] - Fixed a crash that occurred when trying to select a sound file.[/*]
- Fixed that selecting multiple layers was difficult/impossible.[/*]
- Fixed that sometimes the drawing tools would cut into invisible faces.[/*]
- Fixed that double-click-selecting a large interconnected piece of geometry would sometimes crash the editor.[/*]
- NS2+ percentage unit-status option updates too slowly (every 200ms) [list]
- While the flickering issue was resolved, fixing the update rate of this NS2+ option will require the base game to be refactored due to the way this option hooks into the game. This is a goal for our next patch.[/*]
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