By Alec Meer on December 5th, 2008 at 9:21 pm.
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.
The big thing to know about the much-delayed NS2, if you didn’t already, is that they’ve switched from their original plan to build the game on the Source engine to custom-designing their own engine and intending to flog the thing as its own game rather than a free mod, as with NS1. From that interview:
The nice thing about being a small, independent is that we’ll be doing well if we sell even small numbers of units. If we sell 50,000 units we’ll be in good shape, although we hope to sell more. It’s not like we can just sit back though, we’ll have to keep working to make sure we have a healthy company.
So let’s hope they make this sequel a worthy one, and are in return rewarded for their valiant efforts. We’ll try and sort out an interview with the team here too, as it’s a particularly fascinating, risk-laden career path. Their funding model’s interesting enough in itself – a while back they knocked out a slick, timely, self-published Sudoku game that was also one of the earlier third-parties offerings on Steam. Canny buggers, them.
Oh, and here’s that footage:
Another FPS engine, just what the gaming world needs.
“Awesome shadows”, heh.
I just noticed that they stole the Deus Ex 2 NPCs. ;)
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I’ve played Natural Selection for HL before, and I gotta say. Good times. Can’t wait for NC2
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What a Shame.
I mean, looks good (=
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Lighting and shadow effects done right are cool, but seriously that excessive light hurts my eyes.
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Most anticipated game of like, ever for me. I am going to buy NS2 even if they replace the aliens with terrorists and the marines with Counterterrorists and go back to the Source engine. And call it Counterstrike: Source. And it’s actually just Counterstrike: Source again.
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I don’t think I’ve ever said this but: “old.”
I’m a huge fan of the first Natural Selection, which I actually still play. Probably some of, if not the, best FPS multiplayer I’ve ever been involved with. Hell, I was in the beta for it, heh.
I’m really looking forward to it, but the delays make it difficult to stay up to date on things.
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Therlun: Because, you know, it’s not interesting at all to watch how a small, not-particularly-well-funded studio builds a game engine that aims to perform well alongside mainstream engines produced by rather large, money-laden companies with extensive development teams.
Things like “ooh, we’ve got dynamic shadows!” start to be much more interesting and much more relevant when you’re doing them from scratch.
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I’m glad they ditched source
Games on that engine don’t feel good
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I <3 NS1, which I’ve played on and off since the beginning. Call me a traitor to the original concept, but I love combat mode more than standard NS.
Also, the industry needs more good games produced on sane budgets with reasonable sales expectations. If they sell the game over Steam (and by if I mean when), they’ll probably get 500,000 sales easy.
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NS I played more than any game in my life despite my xFire profile saying its battlefield 2 (NS was older than that). Its a lovely game, a game that I put in the gift link of every person I sent a 98c copy of NS.
They have my money, I owe them, NS2 could be a steaming turd and I’d pay. I hope its not a steaming turd and I have faith that after making a brilliant free mod for a game a really worked effort can be marvellous.
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I used to play NS quite a lot, but at the time it suffered from people generally not wanting to play as the commander on the marines side, as it’s quite tricky and you need some sense of tactics and strategy.
Which is where Combat came in and I didn’t like that much, made the game a bit too similar to other multiplayer experiences for me.
That said, I am looking forward to NS2.
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Noc:
Interesting? Perhaps.
Is it really worth all the risk, work and trouble though?
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I’m wishing these guys the best. Had lots of fun with ns1.
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People talk about l4d being cinematic; playing a marine in NS as your base got overrun had a far higher fuckfuckfuck factor…
I’d be looking forward to this so much if I still had a real internet connection.
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Dear Unknown Worlds:
Please succeed, please succeed, please succeed, please succeed, please succeed.
That is all.
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Strange, I would say the opposite. Technically, Source is quite a dirty hack. But it feels wonderfully gritty. I like it.
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They’re doing all the light and shadows “live”? Nothing precompiled? Did I get that right?
Thats insane! INSANE!
But I like it… alot.
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If they only sell 50000 would there even be a big enough playerbase to support decent multiplayer? By decent I mean that there’s always a populated server close enough to you to have a low ping and without crazy mods on it. Without that playerbase a multiplayer game isn’t usually worth owning (unless you’re in a clan or something perhaps).
I have no idea how copies sold translates into online time played. Anyone got stats?
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I hope they don’t get lost in playing catchup with the engine. Really looking forward to this. I spent a lot of time in NS1 getting digested by Onos’s and acid melted by Fades. Good times.
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Not that the Natural Selection engine doesn’t look impressive for such a small team, but given the work coming from equally small groups like the Project Offset team, it can pale in comparison. It is prettier than Mount&Blade though, I shall grant it that.
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@Pags
Uh, I’m not sure you could call the team behind Project Offset “small” anymore…
Granted, it started off small, but there’s now over forty people on the team, so, uh… yeah.
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Pags, you forgot to mention that the equally small group working on Project Offset seems to be Intel.
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They were acquired by Intel in February of this year, almost 3 years after they released their last trailer, which I assume was made by the team when they were smaller.
Not that you aren’t both right though, just that it has no bearing on my point.
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I’m not really too interested in the graphic prowess of the engine. What is of curiosity to me, is how the netcode for the game will work now. Source tends to favour the “lag compensation” (read: client side hit detection), which I have a lot of mixed feelings about. L4D aside though, not as iffy about their integrated server browser setup and voice chat setup. Which would be amusing if they actually made use of Steamworks for that portion of the game.
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I’ll be buying it. NS is the game I’ve played by far the most – up until a year or so ago I’d play it for hours almost daily. Sadly a lot of the servers died and the players left…
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I loved NS1 back in the day but their NS2 plan leaves me cold. It’s not gonna come out for another 4 years at this rate.
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I am more a Tremulous guy, or a Gloom guy (the original Quake 2 mod that started it all). Maybe more a Tremulous guy (better community than gloom, imho).
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The days of NS….*has a nostalgic daydream*…
First proper clan I joined was for NS (-NrS- clan)
Also my third most played game of all time after WoW (now quit) and TF2…
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They should have stayed with the Source engine. At this rate it won’t be out for even more years!
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Old or not, that’s pretty impressive – lighting is a huge part of what determines ambience, and if that’s anything to judge the rest of NS2 by, the immersion factor should be pretty amazing.
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They’re going to have to do something quite revolutionary, moreso than the procedurally-generated biomass spreading over levels that I’ve seen before. I don’t care about shadows. Over the last ten years, when a game has failed to live up to performance expectations, what’s the thing I turn down / shut off? Shadows. I don’t care about shadows.
Between Source: Empires’ meaty RTS mechanics, and Left 4 Dead’s imperfect but still incredible Versus mode (coupled with thick atmosphere and environments), I don’t think a shinier, spiffier-looking Natural Selection would even be worth my time. Source: Empires is also free, given I already have Source. Tremulous is even more free, a stand-alone game that is very similar to Natural Selection.
Having paid money to register my copy of Iron Grip: Warlord, I’m quite leery about paying money for another “mod gone legit”. What benefit is there for me to pay a little extra for an FPS that runs on a different engine when I’m perfectly satisfied with the source engine? I wish I’d bought The Ship and Garry’s Mod instead of that abomination, so to compensate, I won’t be buying Natural Selection 2.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but when I hear they’re going to their engine what I hear is, “add another 20$ to what we would charge if we stayed with source and decided to go commercial”. FFS, Garry’s Mod now has over 300,000 sales and it requires you to work for your fun, anyone who didn’t think an assymetrical online FPS with RTS team elements and a rabid fanbase in the 10 – 20$ range wouldn’t hit 500,000 within a year has something wrong with their brains — or perhaps not, maybe they know their formula is old and dated and this is just an excuse to drastically retool NS2 to compete?
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The source engine wasn’t flexible enough for what they wanted to do, with their own engine it can do exactly what they need it to do instead of futzing around with the code to force it to do something it was never meant to do. The devs did a cost/benefit analysis of moving to their own engine and decided it’s better for them. A month or two after they had moved to using their own engine they had more of the game done than when they were still sticking with source. Their lead programmer, Max, seems like a pretty clever guy so I have faith in them :)
The only problem with this is that the amazing NS community mappers will have to adjust to a new toolset for making their maps instead of being able to use their previous knowledge of Hammer. Hopefully they’ll be able to sort it out whenever the NS2 Tech Release comes out with what I presume would be the mapping tool and the NS2 texture pack.
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So they want to go commercial, and that’s fine, but I don’t understand why they’d abandon the Source engine.
Why add all that time and effort onto your development cycle when someone’s already done the hard work for you? Source already looks pretty spiffy, and it has a large team and years worth of bug fixes behind it.
Why not focus on the actual game?
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(Started writing [slowly] before ZeroByte posted.)
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ZeroByte: Well, that’s all fairly plausible, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard about a mod struggling against the limitations of the Source engine. It just seems like they’ve been working on this thing ever since Half-Life 2 was launched, and still nothing to play to show for it.
Had they known back then that they’d now be working under a new engine, I think they’d have been wise to just finish up Source: Natural Selection, put it out there, maybe charge 10$ for this ‘sadly not everything we wanted it to be’ version, probably please a lot of their old fans and generate buzz (and indie-style funding) for a new and improved version on an in-house engine.
But, hindsight is a lot better than what folks have to work with in the present isn’t it? Any idiot could make a better decision than an experienced devteam could make, assuming the former party could read the future.
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Does anybody else recognise the music they put behind the in-game scenes in the video? I’ve definitely heard it before but I can’t recall where…
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Natural Selection is my favorite mod ever. Versus mode on L4D reminds me of it some.
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That music was actually the ambient music from NS1 which you heard while playing. This may be while it sounds familiar to you.
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Ben: It’s the ambient music from the first NS.
Loved NS. Will hopefully love NS2. However…
I agree they should have just “scaled up” to the Source Engine as a free mod as they originally planned. I understand WHY they are going to their own engine (cool effects plus no compile times is awesome), but they could have gone with a “Vanilla*” version of NS ported to Source they would have kept their community healthy by providing a “Bridge Platform” to their new engine. It would have progressed: NS, NS:S and then NS2.
The main thing I worry about: Dynamic real-time lighting is great…when nothing else is going on, but what happens when you throw this over the internet with clients trying to keep up with bullets paths, hit detection, entity tracking, game mechanics, ect., ect. Suddenly you’ve just cut a lot of players out of the game because thier systems can’t keep up. That dynamic lighting is a beast stacked on top of a beast of a game and I predict that minimum specs to get 30FPS is going to be out of reach for most of the market. I could be wrong, and I hope that I am.
* Vanilla means the exact same gameplay, but with better models and maps.
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My opinion for NS2 has been the same as what it was for Star Craft 2, i will believe it when i see it. I would love to play NS2 when it is released however, considering how much fun NS was.
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Hey, cool. This time we could pay a retail price for the privilege of having dipshit clanners tell us that our observations don’t matter because we aren’t clanners and haven’t taken part in the clanner-only betas. It is, afterall, a good decision to base everything on myopic clan play when the majority of your playerbase will be playing on pub servers with strangers.
The heart of NS2 won’t be the engine, although i’m just dying to have that lovely dynamic lighting completely hose visibility of a quick-moving target at wonderfully inopportune times. What’ll make or break it is if they follow the same moronic balancing methodology that ultimately killed HLNS; most people gave up purely because we were fucking sick of dealing with such insular bullshit.
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@ZeroByte: I agree with everything you say. But my opinion is different: Is a good thing that somewhere some people is tryiing something different. If this experiment work, others mods makers can learn from the experience.. hell… even if this experiment fail, other modders will learn!.
Of course, now is apparent that NS2:Source is a 500.000 units game, so maybe was a bad idea back then. But this is also asymetrical: we have the information now, not back then. Here in spain we say “A toro pasado todos somos buenos toreros”
@NS Team: Good luck guys!
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Regarding the engine: They’ve probably decided to go their own route with it to save money on liscencing one from someone else. Plus im fairly sure there were a few issues with Source that held up a few of their ideas? It was ‘easier’ to create something that was built specifically for their needs. The new engine probably won’t play any part in the pricing of the game.
And the hot price point rumour has always been $20-25. You have to remember, this is an online multiplayer game only. They wont market and price it as anything else.
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Something tells me there is a million-selling game in this team. Probably not NS2, but something down the line. Unknown Worlds are one to watch.
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Bizarre hypothesis – this group either want to or will become part of Valve. That is not a bad thing.
Also, like others above, am very interested to see how this game shapes up, having only heard tales of the first version.
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Surely they would have kept using the Source engine if they wanted to become closer affiliated with Valve.
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It’s reverse psychology, man! They’re being clever about this.
Or perhaps they’re Bizarro devs.
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Considering that EVE Online will have real time Radiosity, this isn’t very impressive.
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Bizzaro, I love you! Bizzaro!
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I remember them starting with NS2 after HL2 was released and very quickly they were talking about how NS2 would no longer be a free mod, even talking about boxed copies on shelves, etc.
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No game has ever replicated the depth of gameplay that standard NS multiplayer gave (I’m ignoring combat, I realize why they did it, but it’s not the point of NS).
Those moments when you realize you’ve just got into the alien hive with no-one about, get the commander to drop a phase gate, and then phase in 5 heavy marines. Or when you’re a skulk and you realize that the commander doesn’t know how to arrange turrets and thus manage to take out an entire base single handedly.
Or just the entirely frantic moments when everything’s going on. I agree with the comment above about left4dead – it does remind me of NS in some ways with the franticness and the asymmetry between the two sides in versus.
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Select Harder
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@caramelcarrot: Meh… you must play Tremulous. Placing turrets in tremulous is a art at itself. Ignore Team Fortress, engineers on teamfortres are totally limited. On Trem you have like 3 turrets (I forget) to play with, and what to repait on the “OH SHIT” moments are really important. IMHO Tremulous is a superior game than Team Fortress 2. But he!, I love to play as engineer.. and I like Turret Defense games/play infected in L4D. Maybe is me :-)
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The very limited time I’ve spent playing NS1 was enjoyable to say the least.
I must say that I am looking forward to eating some faces as an onos when this comes out.
Assuming they keep Onos.
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NS2 has the potential to be better than NS if they manage to strike a balance plus make the game quicker to get into for complete initiates. It’s a ludicrously difficult balancing act to get RTS and FPS co-habiting happily in the same game, but I think they could do it.
I’ve played all other similar games except Tremulous, which I refuse to play because its players are so overly-zealous of it (which just gives me the impression they are over-protective because they know it’s not as good).
- Empires is great but a bit too broad in terms of the tech tree (but the best alternative to NS for me).
- IG:W is a good concept but full of horrible design executed at a very basic level and imho not a very good game at all.
- IG:TO was worse than IG:W, so at least the commercial game is a step up.
- Zombie Master is quite fun but gets a bit stale after a bit, even more so with the might of L4D to contend with.
If anyone is interested in getting into NS, send me a PM on the forums and I can suggest some good (welcoming, and advanced gameplay) servers to go on.
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For those wondering why they ditched the Source engine:
http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/2008/07/engine_questions_and_answers
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“I’m glad they ditched source
Games on that engine don’t feel good”
Finally someone who agrees with me on this! I don’t like how movement feels on the Source engine — I feel like I’m sliding all over the place when I do basic movement.
About this engine, and the people behind it — isn’t it four guys doing this? Because that’s crazy impressive. We have 110 (105? I forget) people at my company, and I know what coding work on a new engine can be like.
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The problem I have with this update is the lighting in NS2 won’t make or break the game, the actual gameplay and timing of the release will. There are more RTS-FPS’ coming out every year and they’re increasing the likelyhood of failure to market NS2. If they would have figured out a way to use an existing cheap game engine they probably be close to a NS2 beta and six months off of releasing a profitable game.
Also Flayra is fucking horrible at balance and listens to the wrong playerbase.
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// Random links:
The original mod, Quake2 Gloom
http://www.planetgloom.com/
Derivative mods:
Tremulous
http://www.tremulous.net/
Natural Selection
http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/
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This is great. Never heard of the original mod. I’m lazy like that. These guys could probably get a job in any studio they wanted, but they’re doing the start up thing. Follow your dreams guys :)
I like that they are targetting a small audience, small budget. It’s like the smart way pioneered by Stardock that proved it pays off (especially when it turns out to be a big hit).
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And yay for RPS giving this media attention!
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Oh, and what happened to the new They Hunger?
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Erlam said, and i’m typing this out manually since the comments layout here sucks due to a mistaken belief that it’s the RPS writers that matter :
“About this engine, and the people behind it — isn’t it four guys doing this? Because that’s crazy impressive. We have 110 (105? I forget) people at my company, and I know what coding work on a new engine can be like.”
Funny thing there. About two years ago, there was a documentary about an indie startup trying to make their own MMORPG. They also ended up creating their own engine despite being a ragtag bunch of volunteers. The head of the project was working part-time as a doorman in NY, away from his wife and child. Another member of the team went homeless for 2 weeks. Another sold his house to move closer to everyone else. The artist for the project was ready to move from Thailand to the states for the project. If there was any group of people that, under these circumstances, had a shot, it was them. If anyone sacrificed more in the process, i’ve never heard about it.
Cut to episode 8 of that documentary series:
“He doesn’t know how hard making a big game is yet”
— Charlie Cleveland, head of the NS team that was more comfortable than the person he was describing thanks to the bullshit Sudoku clone his company crapped out, and whose only real credentials otherwise are driving his own mod into the ground before it had a chance to seriously take off.
Something to keep in mind if you want to be amazed at the poor little indie NS team making their own way.
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Ok… I don’t understand that. What are you trying to say?
Is it wrong to fund your company by creating a casual game that isn’t innovation-in-a-can but earns some money?
Haven’t they’ve been working hard enough because they don’t working part time as doorman? They do not sacrifice enough because they don’t sell their houses or move from Thailand to the US???
I believe this is a world that is not about how much you sacrifice but how much you earn. (You know.. “efficiency”)
If they are able to ship their game than they did it the right way.
Until then… lets see, there is still much time to go to hell for them.
After reading the Q&A cyrenic linked to their engine seems to be a well thought-out concept. (Everything gameplay related in modifiable LUA code + easy level editing because you don’t have to worry about lightning + easy-to-use and powerful tools)
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I don’t know how revolutionary or awesome NS2 will be but I do know I’m going to play it.
I spent a bunch of time playing the original NS and I had a blast.
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teo says: “I’m glad they ditched source
Games on that engine don’t feel good”
Erlam says: “Finally someone who agrees with me on this! I don’t like how movement feels on the Source engine — I feel like I’m sliding all over the place when I do basic movement. ”
Hooray, I thought I was the only one! I’ve never been able to put my finger on it, but most, if not all, Source games I’ve played feel sort of… gooey? I can’t quite explain it though, I mean surely things like acceleration are easily modifiable. Maybe it’s something more fundamental to the physics side of the engine? Or maybe Valve just like their movement style, and most modders don’t bother messing with it. I was also wondering whether it has anything to do with field of view: I find low FOV quite unsettling, and from memory HL2 and its derivatives may have had sub-90 FOV as default, while CS: Source, which felt a bit better to me, didn’t? I have no ida what I’m talking about, but I agree: Source games tend not to feel quite right.
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Magic: It’s certainly a smart thing to put out a profitable game that is nothing new or special just to make money to fund development.
At least they’re not buying other companies and cannibalizing their talent and reputation to trick people into buying crap, so they aren’t quite as bad as a commercial game publisher.
That said, I could see a lot of people doubting Unknown Worlds just because they put out one game already strictly for a profit. That profit was most likely just a realistic way to fund the development of their dream game, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Then again, ‘slippery slope’ arguments don’t prove anything.
Personally I have zero hype for Natural Selection II right now, so much so I won’t even bother making a better-informed decision. No matter what I say, the game will come out sooner or later (or not), and a more informed decision can be made then.
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I cannot wait to play NS2. Regardless of the ratings it will get, regardless of the prize, regardless of the release date. I will buy it the day it comes out!
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[Your insults are no use here - RPS]
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I’ve been waiting so long for them to release something so I can rebuild my map for NS2. If it takes much longer, there won’t be any time for me to do this since paid jobs come first.
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Everything you just said Therlun, was retarded. Deus Ex 2 NPC models? seriously? nice troll i guess.
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I’ve probably played NS more than any other game since Elite – and I can assure you that’s some going !
Really looking forward to it, just hope it retains the scare factor of the original (it’s still the only game that can make you sh!t yourself after 6 years of playing when you’re ambushed by something like a skulk)
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Jon R.:“Something to keep in mind if you want to be amazed at the poor little indie NS team making their own way.”
Uh, if you go to the artist’s website you’ll see that he also made models for the same game that you are throwing a fit over the developers having more of a struggle with.
On a more related note, I hope NS2 is able to keep the same competitive edge and depth while still making it newbie and casual friendly.
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On a more related note, I hope NS2 is able to keep the same competitive edge and depth while still making it newbie and casual friendly.
Exactly. I loved the old NS. People can talk about Tremulous all they want, but that’s just a twitch-shooter with small RTS elements. It doesn’t have the depth or dynamics of NS. To each his own, but for me nothing was more intense than a long push/pull battle of NS.
I was really disappointed when in the later betas, the team made adjustments to the “classic” mode that would make game rounds shorter on average. I used to LOVE these games that could take over 3 hours. For short games we already had the Combat mode, right? Whilst a stale moment in most games ends in bored players leaving, in NS it stays interesting, because there are always so many options to try and change the tide. Also, the power of teamwork can be so insanely great in NS. It makes TF2 seem like a lone-wolf game in comparison, and I love TF2! It’s just that playing TF2 always makes me think of how great NS was. In fact, I’m going to install the old NS again and have some games! There were a good few servers left. Only problem was the community which largely got kind of bittered. For 90% , the only thing you hear over voice is whining about how others can’t play the game right or just plainly suck.
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