Natural Selection 2: Naturally Selectionier

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: