Natural Selection 2, Is it as fun as it looks?

[Cludo]

Hey guys, So I've just watched Totalbuscuits video on Natural Selection 2 and my god it looks so fun.
Just wondering if any of you fine chaps have played this game at all, And is it worth the pre-purchase to get into the Beta?

Whats some pros and cons of the game?

[ddsad2212]

I believe its closed beta so no one can really tell you atm, however from what i heard about NS1, it was mostly played on custom servers that people rented/bought, this meant that there was always alot of team work and a decent to good community, while there were other free severs full of idiots that had been banned off the good ones.
There are games like it, but it seems very fun, and the shotting mechanics look good, apart from that i can`t really say cant wait to try it out though

[Cludo]

What you get for Pre-purchasing Natural Selection 2.

Immediate beta access on Steam
Full version when done (via Steam)
Our eternal gratitude

http://www.naturalselection2.com/buy

[hailey]

No it's really bad, beta averages like 30 players tops. Don't believe the TotalBiscuit PR, the game was supposed to be out 3 years ago and is still a mess

[bals]

it was mostly played on custom servers that people rented/bought, this meant that there was always alot of team work and a decent to good community, while there were other free severs full of idiots that had been banned off the good ones.

that's how all the half life 1/2 (well not positive on 2) servers work.

ns1 was pretty fun, it only ever had a pretty small community though.
like the guy above said ns2 they have been working on forever now it seems. it started out as a halflife 2 mod but then they couldn't get source to work how they wanted so they scraped it and started a new version.

[ddsad2212]

Sorry to say i dont understand how a lack of people makes a game bad? That can be fit by one tb video in all honesty. Also can you expand on why it is bad hailey? If it was suppose to be out 3 years ago then it may well have been scrapped meaning we can not call it been buggy a bad thing. Has anyone got any actual criticism on game mechanics out side "it sucks because lack of people(which can easily be fixed)" or "its a mess (while its still in beta" ?

[hailey]

The lack of people is because no one wants to play it. It's been in beta for a long time now and they routinely release builds that break and fix things and people will show up for a few hours and then just disappear again because it's just no good. And I was a HUGE fan of NS1. Don't think"oh it just hasn't sold" pre orders have been open for years and all the NS1 community pre ordered the second they could, and you'll still find more people playing NS1 than NS2 years later. There's a lot of problems.

First, they decided to build their own engine, but they are a very small company of questionable coding ability, so we have an engine that has really horrible FPS that is dependant on dynamic lighting to look good, which bogs down performance tremendously. Those TB videos are probably on an incredibly high end machine and you can still see the stutter/low FPS. You'll also notice people warp around, because the netcode is abysmal. Over 10 people in a game and you're looking at everyone having 300 ping minimum. There's things they've been promoting since day1 like dynamic infestation which is nowhere in sight.

The gameplay is awful. From the netcode, to the actual changes from NS1 to NS2, they have just ruined everything. Marine movement is like you are in molasses, and you go about a tenth of your forward speed when backing up. It's just not fun to play. Aliens aren't about movement anymore since they took out things like bunny hop and didn't really replace it with anything. The balance is non existant and changes drastically from patch to patch even though the game isn't even feature complete, I don't know why they keep messing around like that.

The truth is it's still not really a playable, fun game, years after it was supposed to be released. There's a tiny group of people who still cling to some hope, and they routinely submit their own bug fixes for things that the team are either too busy to get to or incapable of fixing. Everyone else has moved on.

Buy it if you want, I really don't care. I guess more sales means technically it will be finished sooner, but this sort of hype has been going on for years and they don't really show anything for it. You'll probably play it once and say "okay maybe in a few months when it's more complete"

Then months become years

[Cludo]

I think i will hold off then, at least until the game grabs more attention or becomes closer to being finished.

[Howard Moon]

<snip>

Ouch, that sounds bad. That's a shame, it looked pretty fun judging by TB's videos. Though TBH the Alien's perspective didn't look that great. Visibility seems like a big issue and ceiling-crawling looks really clunky. But the Marine's side looked like great fun, and the Commander's role seems pretty interesting.