Genre: Shooter, Real Time Strategy (RTS), Strategy, Indie
Natural Selection 2
Update 315 Released!
Summer is finally upon us and with that the forthcoming mighty Steam Sale. Sales usually bring in a lot of new faces to the game and over the years, we have worked hard to make changes that help those new to NS to learn and enjoy the game as all of us do. Please welcome these new players as they become familiar with the game.
With Update 315 we have consolidated the PLAY menu, updated the server browser and added new help screens for players. While in game you can now bring up an overlay that explains your individual player or lifeform controls all based on your key binds. We hope that this feature will help to better explain abilities and even upgrades to new players.
Alien egg spawning has been adjusted to scale with players which should lead to better spawning and encourage alien hive expansion too! Some additional improvements were made to gorge tunnels to allow for quicker and easier placement. See more about the gameplay changes in the changelog below.
We are also aware of some stability issues that players were experiencing in the previous update. We have worked to resolve those with this release and hope that this provides a better experience for those of you dealing with this problem.
Update 315 Changelog
Gameplay
Tweaks / Improvements
Fixes
SDK
Join the NS2 Playtesting Team!
Due to recent Kharaa invasions, we are in need of reinforcements on the frontlines of testing!
Enlist HERE to join the Natural Selection 2 Playtest Team to ensure smooth battlefield updates can occur for the rest of your fellow brothers and sisters.
Keep in mind that we only need the most dedicated of enlistees to jump aboard this mission, with availabilities to strenuously test and provide thorough reports. If you think you can take up this honorable task, you’ll be awarded with a designated badge that demonstrates your commitment to the TSF.
Update: ENSL.org Season 11
This is an short update for last month post about the ENSL.org Season 11.
The sign ups for the 11th Season of the ENSL will close today. So this is your last chance to sign up.
The season will start at the 22nd of March. It will take 2 to 3 months with around 1 match per week. Matches will be schedule by the teams through the match pages.
Each Team needs at least 6 players on their roster until the 17th March to participate in the 11th Season of the ENSL.
Also each player has to make sure they only signed up with one team for the season. Otherwise the ensl.org admins will remove them from all teams except the highest seeded one.
The final teams seeding will get published on the 17-18th March via a forum post at ensl.org .
Update 314 Now Live on Steam!
Since the holidays we’ve seen an influx of both new and old players coming back to NS2. We continue to receive lot of positive feedback to many of the changes we’ve made over the last year. With this update we’re focused on some maintenance but also continuing to improve smaller features in the game to enhance the player experience.
Beyond update 314 we’re looking at ways to help players quickly find and play games. We’ve noticed more and more people at peak times around the globe are idling in the server browser, trying to join the populated servers. This long wait can cause them to quit; an improvement is clearly needed. To that end, we’ve been working on ideas on how to better seed servers with these idling players and have been making good progress on a potential match-making system. Keep your eyes peeled for more info on that soon!
Lastly, I am happy to announce that we will begin public testing of our 64-bit server sometime in the next week. Our amazing community of server operators seem to be very excited to get their hands on this BETA server and we are just as thrilled. We hope that the 64-bit client beta will be coming to you all soon as well. The move to 64-bit will open up a lot more opportunities to our development team, such as better utilization of more modern hardware and adding more content to the game. Sadly, we’ve reached the limits of what 32-bit allows the game to do. Many other games are facing the same transition; you may have noticed similar announcements from other studios recently on this topic as well.
We’re always looking for ways to build our community of players, modders, operators and playtesters. Without you, we wouldn’t be here. We have the excitement and desire to keep moving forward and hope that you will join us in the journey!
Gameplay
Tweaks / Improvements
Fixes
Maps
Refinery (Contributed by Samus!).
Tram
SDK
March Mod Madness Tournament 2017
After the newcomer tournament and the upcoming season of the competitive league we are happy to announce the Mod Madness tournament! This tournament is dedicated to those who are looking for a little less competitive but fun evening event.
What is it and what can I win? The Mod Madness tournament is a unique event for all players to try out the amazing custom game modes that have been created for Natural Selection 2. All game modes (except NS2:Combat) can be found in the NS2 Steam Workshop or under the Arcade tab in the server browser.
Every participant will get a brand new in-game badge! Furthermore the tournament winner will receive a gold version while the second and third will receive a silver one.
The tournament will take place at the 4 March 2017 from 19 CET / 13 EST till 23-24 CET /15-16 EST
Till when can I/we sign up? Sign ups for the tournament will end on the 2 March 2017 on 22:00 CET
Who can sign up? Everybody! You only need a copy of NS2 and good sense of humor. Most likely nobody has played every game mode of this tournament before! You can sign up as a team of 8 or as an individual.
Do I need a team? Nope! You will be assign to one before the tournament starts.
How will the tournament be structured? First you will play a match of NS2Large (16 vs 16) where two teams group up for each side. Afterwards the winning teams will choose which tournament division (set of game modes) they want to play in. The losing teams will be randomly assigned in the remaining positions in the division.
The division matches will be run as double elimination:
When a team loses a match, they switch divisions. Losing another match eliminates them from the tournament. So each team will participate at least in the 16vs16 match and 2 more matches after that.
Each match will be a best of 3. Before each match a random team will select the map to play at, and the other team chooses which side they want to start with.
ENSL.org Season 11
First of all we would like to thank everybody who took part at last week's Newcomer Tournament. We hope both participants and spectators enjoyed it as much as we did.
In addition a special thanks goes out to Ixian, Luchs and Hoeloe who casted this event and every ensl.org referee and admin. Because without them this tournament would never have happened.
In case you participated your badge is now available in your steam inventory. You can enable it in-game via the Customize Player menu. Should somebody miss their badge please leave a comment below.
For all of those who are now fired up for some more competitive Natural Selection 2 action we have good news:
So don’t be shy! Grab your team and sign up. The exact date of the seasons start will be announced at ensl.org .
ENSL.org Newcomer Tournament 2017
What is the Newcomer Tournament 2017 and what can I/we win ? The ENSL.org Newcomer Tournament is an opportunity for all the players (rookie or veteran) to test their skill in a competitive environment balanced for 6vs6.
You can find a rundown of the differences between the normal and competitive balance (Comp Mod) at http://www.ensl.org/articles/998
Every participant receives as special treat a brand new in-game badge. The teams making it first and second receive a golden and silver badge everybody else that shows up and plays a Match gets a blue one:
Newcomer tournament will happen: 4 February 2017 start 19 CET / 13 EST till 23-24 CET /15-16 EST 5 February 2017 start 19 CET / 13 EST till 23-24 CET /15-16 EST On the maps: Tram, Veil, Summit, Biodome, Descent
We will use Teamspeak 3 for communication.
Please show up for the tournament on 4 February at 18:30 CET/12:30PM EST. on the ENSL TS3 Server:
IP: ensl.org
Channel: Newcomer Tournament early 2017 ReadyRoom
Till when can I/we Sign up?:
Sign ups for the Tournament will end on the 2 February 2017 on 22:00 CET
Who can sign up?:
Anybody who hasn’t participated in any season of Natural Selection 2 tournaments of the NSL or AusNSL can sign up as regular player.
Everybody else is free to sign up as coach or commander. You may be able to play as regular player in case you haven’t played a full season yet.
Where do I Join Up?
What is ENSL.org(nsleagues.org) ? The Natural Selection League (NSL) is an organization that provides a platform for all Natural Selection 2 players for organized and competitive play. The vision of the NSL is to gather Natural Selection 2 players for international organized play. At its very core, we would simply like games to be played, in the hopes that this fosters tangible and meaningful relationships among its participants. We realize that its participants span the range of commitment, skill, and time zones and will do everything possible to cater to everyone’s needs and create the most enjoyable experience.
How are the teams arranged? We will create team lists internally after these criteria:
We will post a list of the teams here: http://ensl.org/forums/28 If people have complaints please voice them in the given forum thread and we will try to adjust the list accordingly.
How should i get used to 6vs6 games ? We strongly advise all players who wish to take part to read some NS2 tutorials:
You can find a few here: http://ensl.org/forums/22
It also helps to play some Gathers when you are no longer challenged at regular servers. (Warning: The average hive skill can be above 2000) :
How to play Gathers:http://www.ensl.org/topics/1751 (They usually happen often from 20:00 CET to 4:00 CET)
Gathers will give you a feel for fast-paced competitive 6v6 NS2 before the tournament Matches!
Also we recommend to watch the
Season 10 division 2 Finals and see how the more experienced Players play:
S10 Div2 Finals:
Isay vs Close One 101 29 January 2017 19 CET / 13 EST
Casted on/by: twitch.tv/dkrecon / ReconDK
S10 Div2 Finals:
HBZ vs Horror Show 29 January 2017 20:30 CET / 14:30 EST
Casted on/by: twitch.tv/naturalselection2 / Ixian
~ ENSL.org admins
Update 313 (Kham Tutorial) is now live on Steam!
A happy new year to all of you out there! I’ll bet some of you thought we hit the snooze button around the holidays and never woke up, but no! We’ve been tinkering in the shadows and working on some fun new stuff to show you.
First off, we’re finally finishing up on our changes to NS2 training and bringing you the new Alien Commander tutorial. As per usual, BeigeAlert has put a lot of love and once again, yes, even an easter egg into this new training scenario. Special shout out to all our contributors in tutorial-committee for their input and advice. We decided to also make some slight changes to a couple gameplay features to continue and round out some of our changes made during the last year.
The patch is filled with lots of little bug fixes and updated features such as; a new updated machine gun texture, a refactored badge system allowing us to have better and quicker control over distribution of badges and some improvements to cyst placement.
Lastly, and to the future… I am happy to announce that while work is still being done to test stability, NS2 is now being beta tested in 64-bit! FSFOD and others on the team have been hard at work upgrading lots of code and plugins to allow this to happen and so far our testing is proving great. Why do I mention this now? Well, with the update we will be able to open up a variety of new features and abilities within the game and engine that were a bottleneck in 32-bit, memory consumption being primary concern.
Also we will be working reaching out to some of our community server ops to help us run public tests on the 64-bit platform to see what gains or stability or problems arise. So look for more information about 64-bit in future updates.
We at Unknown Worlds would like to thank the community for its continued passion and dedication to NS2!
-Dillon “WasabiOne”
Gameplay
Tweaks / Improvements
Fixes
Maps
SDK
Update 312 now live on Steam
The Halloween event and free weekend went great, but it was not without its issues. Luckily we were able to resolve the issues without needing to do a steam update by using our extension system (these are the Lambda, Delta, and Omega extensions you see when you join a server). We try to limit our use of the extension system to avoid conflicting with mods, and that is the main reason we are patching this week, and why it is a light one. With this maintenance patch we are integrating those fixes into the main game, clearing out the extensions, and attempting to deploying the badge customization UI for the second time. We also realized that not enough people knew about the new shoulder patch that was able to be earned during the Halloween weekend by playing Infested, so we’ve decided to remove the time lock on it, and allow it to be earned at any time through games of Infested.
There are plenty of other exciting features coming down the pipeline, but they are not quite ready.
Natural Selection 2 is free to play on Steam all weekend! This Halloween, NS2 celebrates its fourth birthday, and NS1 its 14th!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/4920/
Come and see what this Alien vs Marine shooter / strategy hybrid is all about. We've got new-player-friendly servers springing up all over the world, so don't be shy, come and get bitten by a Skulk!
NS2 has continued to receive constant updates over the past four years, with Update 311 being released earlier today. Even if you've played NS2 before, chances are there are lots of new features and improvements to explore.
