Natural Selection 2, the asymmetrical scifi shooter from the makers of Subnautica, is no longer in active development. Unknown Worlds say that after over ten years of support, it's now "time to look to the future and continue on to other projects within the company."
]]>Krafton, the South Korean company behind Plunkbat and Tera, today announced that they're buying Unknown Worlds, the studio splendid subaquatic survival sim series Subnautica and the fantastic FPS-RTS hybrid Natural Selection. Huh! The professed plan is for them to keep on as usual, still working on the Subnauticae as well as a mystery game debuting next year.
]]>In the apparently endless battle-rap between developers and key reseller marketplace G2A, the shop has lobbed a lyrical bomb back at Unknown Worlds. As we reported yesterday, Subnautica and Natural Selection 2 developer Charlie Cleveland alleged: “We paid $30,000 to deal with credit card chargebacks because of G2A.”
G2A’s fascinating response: “Selling keys on a marketplace which was yet to come into existence seems unreasonable at best.”
]]>Subnautica developer Unknown Worlds has asked grey market key reseller G2A to pay them $300,000 in restitution. The developer claims the amount represents the $30,000 it had to spend to cover chargebacks from fraudulent credit card purchases of Natural Selection 2. G2A had previously promised to pay 10x the amount of any costs lost via fraudulent purchases on their site, as long as there’s proof such a thing occurred.
]]>Halloween is an extra-special time of year for sci-fi FPS-RTS Natural Selection, as the birthday of both the original Half-Life mod and its standalone commercial sequel [official site]. In celebration, developers Unknown Worlds have opened up NS2 for the weekend and let everyone play for free. Battling aliens, knee deep in bacterial gunk, or chomping on the juicy heads of space marines seems fittingly frightful Halloween fun.
]]>Last year, Natural Selection 2 [official site] creators Unknown Worlds handed development duties on their aliens vs. space marines FPS-RTS over to a team of community volunteers, then themselves dived down into alien oceans to build Subnautica. Ah, but landlubbers will always pine for the shore (or for space?). A year-and-a-half later, Unknown Worlds are getting back into NS2, hiring some of those community folks on as an in-house team to resume development for a few months.
]]>August was a busy month for the RPS community, with action seen in Dirt Rally [official site], Rocket League [official site], Terraria [official site] and others - including Awesomenauts [official site], Natural Selection 2 [official site] and Killing Floor [official site].
Click on for information about each, along with how you can get involved.
]]>No-one in their right mind would have put down money on 'sandbox submarine adventure' being the next project from the creators of human vs alien FPS/RTS crossbreed Natural Selection. I did, however, and as a result I became a billionaire. Unfortunately I then put down a billion quid on Destiny turning out to be Frog Fractions 2 in disguise, and now I am poor again. Swings, roundabouts.
Devs Unknown Worlds have been teasing bits and bobs of Subnautica - for that is the submarine game's name - for a while, but now they have video footage of how badly wrong being full fathom five can be. Here is a fact: a video is like a picture, but it moves and sometimes there is sound too. I hear it's the future.
]]>I do enjoy visiting horrible guts. I've leapt between the grinding teeth of The Many in System Shock 2, chainsawed a city-devouring worm's heart(s) in Gears of War 2, and admired a meatwizard's DIY skills in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Now I'm keen to play Natural Selection 2: Combat, as developers Faultline Games have showed off its horrors of being devoured alive.
Being swallowed by a space-rhino will leave us trapped in its guts, desperately calling for help and pounding on meat as it closes around us and as acids fizz at our flesh before we reach, er, the finale of the digestion process. All from an appalling first-person view. What great guts!
]]>Well here's a thing. Unknown Worlds is (mostly) moving on from excellent humans vs aliens multiplayer FPS Natural Selection 2. It's a relatively small team, and Subnautica isn't going to build itself. NS2, however, will. Sort of. A community dev team has been given UW's official blessing, so expect to be gorging yourself on their creations soon. Details below.
]]>Can any of us honestly say we have never dreamed of creating a beautiful garden from flesh and bone, bile and spit? I thought not. That's the problem with these 'Craft' games: they tend to use everyday building materials like stone and metal. Give me great citadels of bone draped in banners of skin, the absurd excesses of heavy metal album covers come to virtual life. Or, failing that, GorgeCraft will do.
The mod turns Natural Selection 2 into a building sandbox, letting us cough up biological lumps and structures wherever we please as architects of oozing monstrosities. It left beta and launched over the weekend, and you can snag it from the Steam Workshop.
]]>Half-Life begot the mod Natural Selection, which begot standalone sequel Natural Selection 2, which together with NS1's Combat mode incestuously begot NS2's Combat mod, which now begets standalone game Natural Selection 2: Combat. It's all a bit like Chronicles with assault rifles.
Faultline Games are taking their Combat mod standalone, they've announced, expanding and polishing it up as one would expect. Combat's a murder-oriented version of Natural Selection, focusing on the asymmetric humans vs. aliens FPS combat while doing away with RTS-y bits like resource-gathering and commanders. It also splashes in RPG-y levelling, with murder-earned skill points unlocking new weapons, tech, life forms and whatnot.
]]>Are you tired of sales? Did Black Friday and Cyborg Monday beat your wallet to a penniless pulp? Well, TOO BAD. Games will continue going on sale from now until the end of time, and somewhere in between, you will cast off your mortal coil poor and probably alone. I apologize. That was too much. Sales just get me super amped up about mortality, is all. Anyway, the Humble Jumbo Bundle is composed of six games and tons of DLC. Standouts include Natural Selection 2, Sanctum 2, and Orcs Must Die! 2. Details below.
]]>I started writing this story just to point out that Natural Selection 2 is going to have a free weekend over the next few days, and that if you hadn't yet bought it then you should take a look. It's a really good indie multiplayer shooter that managed to overshadow Aliens: Colonial Marines in every possible way, and they've just updated it with loads of new content. There's new weapons, female player models, better tutorials, and more. There's a trailer for that below. But there's also a trailer for a new crowd-funding scheme as well. Unknown Worlds has released free updates for the game since it's been launched, but as the game's returns diminish they need cash to continue working on it full-time. The latest free update cost them $550,000. Their hope? That a tiered donation and reward system will recoup some of that expenditure. UPDATE: Unknown Worlds have responded to some of my concerns. They're at PAX and recorded a video. I've embedded it below.
]]>In Natural Selection 2, you can play as just about anything. Gigantic pairs of teeth with tiny feet attached, mutant god elephants, space pterodactyls, scythe-armed devil wraiths, and, you know, men. But not human women. At least, not yet. Thankfully, that's all about to change, as Unknown Worlds has unveiled a female marine design that's, well, pretty freaking great. Better late than never, I suppose. So hurrah! Details after the break.
]]>Here's a cautionary tale, and a stark reminder that digital goods are still the World Wide Wild West. While a majority of PC games these days seem to ultimately involve a Steam key (which is itself an understandably controversial state of affairs), ownership of one of those keys can be sold by any number of third parties. So we see online stores both reputable and troublesome striving to offer downloads for less than a direct Steam activation, less than each other and, most commonly, less than the frequently outrageously inflated official pricing in some territories. Such was (and presumably is) the case for Natural Selection 2. Revealed developer Unknown Worlds yesterday, "Recently, a batch of 1,341 NS2 Steam keys were purchased using stolen credit cards. These keys were then offered for sale by various resellers. The owners of said cards disputed the transactions, and thankfully received their money back."
Thankfully for them, but less thankfully for a) Unknown Worlds and b) the people who had bought the keys.
]]>When you look at RPS, wherever you might be, RPS looks back at you. We're a lot like The Void in that way. Fear not, however, for our uncanny glare should not intimidate you. Usually we simply squint through the screen and ponder what it is about our words and faces that attracts the most handsome readers of all. I can't confirm whether or not Natural Selection 2 developers Unknown Worlds watch players of their game battling one another in the people vs aliens team-based shooter, but they are evidently pleased with their lovely playerbase because today they are releasing the Gorgeous expansion for free. "It includes Railguns, Gorge Tunnels, Descent, and quite a few fun surprises."
]]>There are quite a few communities bustling away in the General Sociability forum, and some of those have produced of videos of their antics. I've embedded just a few of those below. There are many more, and I am sure others still I haven't seen.
Are you doing video stuff with the RPS community? Link your work/play in the comments!
]]>Natural Selection 2's intense multiplayer sci-fi corridor-combat has given me odd dreams. I am not sure why that's relevant, but I wanted to mention it.
Unknown Worlds' long-awaited sequel (since 2002!) to the original hybrid mega-mod has been out for a while now, and I've been snapping my giant, slavering jaws on the live servers during that time. I believe this means I am ready to send you an encoded transmission that tells you wot I think.
]]>Natural Selection 2 is out. You can buy it right now. Given that it's actually possible both purchase and play (!) a great many games, that might not seem like such a huge deal to you. But make no mistake: Unknown Worlds' RTS/FPS buildy-chompy-shooty hybrid could've easily died on the vine. And it nearly did - over and over and over, for pretty much the entirety of its development cycle. Fortunately, the NS2 team has always had a secret weapon on its side: a community that is - by most definitions of the word - completely and rather terrifyingly insane. This is their story.
]]>Imagine all the things you could do with seven hours. You could have a somewhat unsatisfying sleep. You could go on a plane flight that wouldn't quite get you to America. You could complete Dishonored fifteen times. You could clean up your Goddamn house.
One thing you don't have to do with seven hours is spend them impatiently waiting for Natural Selection 2, which after years of development has had its release date moved forward ever so slightly.
]]>Unknown Worlds have sent word that their hybird FPS/RTS Natural Selection 2 will finally be released on October 31st. Natural Selection 2 is a sequel to the famed and enormously popular Half-Life mod, which was one of the most ambitious attempts to shake up the "Fortress" formula, introducing a top-down commander to bring a tactical-oversight aspect to the usual team-based combat. It was also, brilliantly, asymmetrical, with space marine types fighting a varied team of aliens. Natural Selection 2 is a complete rebuild of that concept, and frankly it looks astonishing. I can't wait to get stuck in to the finished game. Trailer belooooow.
]]>True fact: natural selection, the "survival of the fittest" cornerstone of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, was named after Unknown Worlds' Natural Selection 2. Yes, that's right: Natural Selection 2 has been in development since the mid-1800s. Check a history book. It's the truth. But now, after generations of tweaking and perfecting its particular brand of asymmetrical aliens vs marines blasting/teeth-gnashing, the developer's ready to unleash its promising creation on our lowly, non-immortal forms. What exactly will you get, though? Let's find out.
]]>We all like robot battlesuits. Yes, even you, Steve. So it is with whirr-stomp gladness that we are able to reveal Natural Selection 2's exosuit. Yes, it's a robot suit, with a man inside, with guns for arms. And it is clearing away aliens like a leaf-blower at work in the park. Unknown Worlds explain the wider context of this auto-death machine: “Along with this mechanized pain train, the impending Exosuit patch includes a brand new map: Veil. The patch is also packed with bug fixes, balance adjustments, and performance improvements. The physics system has been completely overhauled. A new hint system gives greater accessibility for new players, while a menu option allows experienced players a clear HUD. New commander UI’s are making it easier for those of you who aspire to lead, and a new power grid system will allow you to place structures more deftly."
Instant beta access is available with a pre-order.
]]>Rezzed was twelve hundred million years ago, but there are still a few dev sessions left to share with those who couldn't make it down to lovely Brighton on the day. Here's Unknown Worlds chatting about and demonstrating their aeons-in-gestation FPS/RTS mash-up Natural Selection 2, including a whole lot of giant mouth-based action.
]]>Another quick Rezzed update for you - joining the increasingly mighty throng of games'n'devs attending the PC games show in Brighton, UK next Month are Unknown Worlds and their long-awaited multiplayer alien-vs-men epic Natural Selection 2. Hugh Jeremy from Unknown Worlds is going to do a stage demo of the Half-Life mod-gone-pro and audience Q&A at 5pm on Friday 6th July.
]]>I feel like having your eyes located inside your mouth - just behind a jagged row of teeth that probably uses live sharks as dental floss - would pigeon hole you a bit from a career standpoint. Such is the plight of Natural Selection 2's Skulk aliens, and yet, they seem to do rather well for themselves within their small area of chompy expertise - at least, if Natural Selection 2's latest trailer is any indication. This time around, the asymmetrical puny, mechanically assisted humans vs horrifying aliens (some of whom are colossal elephant monsters) action takes place on a new map called Docking, which should be available to closed beta players any time now. It's a positively gorgeous mix of red-hued industrialism, green alien goop, and, er, some form of shooting range/basketball court, but the shooty, bitey, bleedy goodness is the real star here. Check out the madness after the break.
]]>Some days you click on a trailer and realise the developers have mapped out your life for the two months following their game's release. Assuming Team Fortress 3 isn't squeezed out in Summer of this year, I'll be jetpacking around on Natural Selection 2, Unknown Worlds' Aliens-inspired FPS/RTS multiplayer game. Here's why.
]]>Dynamic infestation is not pictured in this picture, which pictures aliens being fought by soldiermen. But it is pictured in a new video diary from the Natural Selection 2 beta developement thing. Excitingly, I have used 21st century internet technology to make it visible in the extended version of this blog post. Unknown Worlds' Charlie Cleveland told us: "As you may remember, we got a ton of attention awhile back when we released a video of our first dynamic infestation prototype. We've since written our own engine (switched away from Source) but we now have a basic, playable, version of dynamic infestation, in-game and ready to test." And that's what is in the video.
]]>Unknown Worlds superfan channel Natural Selection 2 HD has been charting the progress of the FPS/RTS hybrid with meticulous detail over the past few months, and most recently the man behind it made a trip to the California-based studio to meet the team and find out some more about the team and the game. I've posted the "meet the team" video below, for your viewing pleasure.
Natural Selection 2's pre-orders have apparently doine a huge amount to get the game to the "next stage" and the ongoing beta is yielding significant results for the team. We hope to have own interview with Unknown Worlds, as well as a hands-on with the game, pretty soon.
]]>Ooh, we've got the first official game footage trailer from the Natural Selection 2 beta! The hybrid RTS-FPS multiplayer sequel is in pre-order-based beta at the moment, where it is being tweaked and honed and squeezed into shape by the testers and developers alike. For those of us who haven't dared dip in, however, it's not been clear quite how this thing plays. Unknown Worlds have addressed that with a brand-spanking new video, which you can check out below. It shows the RTS mode, as well as lashings of combat. There's also perspectives from both alien and marine side, giving you an idea of how the game should play out.
]]>Hybrid FPS strategy game Natural Selection 2 - which is threatening to be dangerously good - has begun a closed beta. Accessed via Steam, this stage of the beta will be available to the first 10,000 people who preorder. You can do that here, should you be so inclined. I've posted the most recent trailer, which features the teleporting "Fade" alien class, below.
Unknown Worlds, if you are reading, you need to make a decent gameplay footage trailer that explains the concept of the game. Thanks!
]]>Unknown Worlds appear to be creeping towards the final stages of the epic development of their RTS-FPS multiplayer hybrid sequel, Natural Selection 2. The $20 pre-order is going to give folks access to an alpha test from the 26th of this month. Apparently 12,000 people have already pre-ordered, so you should have no shortage of people to "test" things with. Pre-ordering also unlocks the SDK, tools, and fancy armour (pictured). This one has been so long in the making that, at times, I thought it was never going to happen. It is happening, and it's looking like an extremely interesting example of a what a seven-man independent team can achieve when they really want to make the game in question. (Old) teaser, trailer plus more recent footage, below.
]]>Crikey! At last. Following their winning of the best upcoming indie game in the ModDb award, they've uploaded some better quality footage than what was used in the award reel. It's still pre-alpha, they stress, and they wouldn't normally release this into the community in this state, but they're in a celebratory, sharing mood. Frankly, it looks fine to me.
]]>Goo did it. Radiohead did it. Even educated independent PC videogames do it. This time, it's Petri Purho's Crayon Physics deluxe - yours for however much you care to pay for it. 10p or 10 pentasquilliongillion Venusian sex-dollars, whatever you feel it deserves/are comfortable with. It's a strategy that worked out pretty well for 2D Boy when they did the same thing with World of Goo last year, despite the vast majority of folk offering insultingly but inevitably low tithes. Be interesting to see if it plays out as profitably for Sir Purho; while his game certainly isn't the out and out triumph that Goo was, it's a fun and inventive science'n'creation puzzler that's certainly worth a punt in this mega-deal. Which lasts only until January 15th, so hurry.
In other Super Indie Game Deal news, if you preorder both Natural Selection 2 and Overgrowth at once, you get 'em both for pretty much the price of one. More on that in tomorrow's Bargain Bucket, and videos of all three games I've whiffled about here are below the cut.
]]>None of your artificial ones here. Though, that said, these are the fruits of NS2's budding modders' experimentation rather than straight-from-the-source stuff - but they're a useful demonstration of what Unknown Worlds' still-mysterious new engine may be capable of. They rather evoke Doom 3, but obviously a lot more amped up and mega-detailed. I found the dark, ominous metal corridors oddly beautiful in a way - though once tediously onmipresent, this kind of environment isn't something we see that much of these days, and do remind me that there's a reason we've always thrilled to the Aliens look.
]]>Seven years ago to this very day, uber-Half-Life mod Natural Selection was released. Man! Aliens! Man vs aliens, in a real-time-strategy-in-an-FPS-perspective kinda way! In that time, it's become something of a landmark in terms of just how far you can stray from the source technology (pun not necessarily intended), just how successful a group of a have-a-go home designers can be, and quite how much prescribed concepts of first-person-shootage can be pushed. Developers Unknown Worlds Entertainment are gearing up for the insanely-anticipated release of the standalone sequel (of which the first and second super-shiny images of this post come from - click to embiggen), whose birth depends hugely on how much pre-order interest they can drum up. In other words, if you're excited about NS2, you should totally pre-order it. It's going to be a fine and splendid day in PC land when it finally walks our way.
Right now though, given it's NS1's anniversary day, we poked Unknown Worlds' Game Director Charlie Cleveland into providing a little insight into how this milestone mod came to be...
]]>Time to check up again on upcoming Half-Life mod-goes-pro Natural Selection 2: is it still bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and wet-nosed? Its creators Unknown Worlds have been dribbling out a stream of bestial teasers for this long-time coming multiplayer shooter. Natural Selection's big draw has always been man vs aliens - with the neat twist that those aliens are playable. And they're really not just A Man With A Funny Hat On...
]]>Well, not all, but a healthy "some". Mostly regarding that recent teaser trailer for the long delayed standalone sequel to the classic Half-Life mod, which delighted and confused in equal measure. I had a quick chat with Unknown World's Game Director Charlie Cleveland about the most salient points raised by the trailer. Does the game really look that good? Is it really coming out this year? Which is best, daddy or chips?
]]>The acclaimed man vs aliens FPS-RTS Half-Life mod done good is something I don't believe we've mentioned on this silly old site of ours before, and the same's true of its impending sequel. Curse our grasshopper minds. Let's correct that, with a link to a fairly dry but handy fundamentals-establishing interview with the dev team, Unknown Worlds, over on Nofrag. Perhaps more importantly, I've conveniently Youtube-snaffled the first footage of the new engine, which is looking impressively shiny.
]]>
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