Natural Selection who?  Darwin?

Hold on to your wildly sized beaks because the most ambitious Half-Life mod ever created is back, this time with its own engine in Natural Selection 2.

Natural Selection attempted to merge 2 of our favorite genres: FPS and RTS – quite successfully, too I might add.

GameSpy hailed:

Natural Selection as “possibly the most ambitious user-made modification ever brought to fruition. This multiplayer-only mod somehow manages to transform the aging Half-Life into a seemingly brand-new, atmospheric, and surprisingly deep action-strategy game, pitting hive-minded aliens against resourceful space marines,” and “Natural Selection’s innovations are too numerous to list, but the marine’s “commander” mode deserves special mention. Playing as the marine commander, you can order and re-supply other marines in an RTS-style, top-down perspective.”

FPS, tech-tree, resource management.

NS2 was refreshing, with 3 versions over its lifetime.  But with he release of Half-Life 2, production started around2006 on Natural Selection 2 on the Source Engine but things weren’t to be.  In July 2008, it was announced that the developers would start all over, creating their own engine from scratch.

We were having some difficulties after licensing Source, where things were taking longer than we expected where some of the cool things… single player stuff… weren’t that important… We found that we were making a lot of changes.  A lot of changes were going into the engine with unknown consequences…

Considering they had lots of custom tools and scripting already created to make source work, they put all that into making their own engine.

Meanwhile, they asked their community for help.  By purchasing other products, like a custom soduko game and making available a Special Addition Pre-Order, they raised enough money to finance this labor of love.

Honestly without you, the NS community, we wouldn’t be here today. Both because we wouldn’t have the money to continue and because all the work wouldn’t be worth it. When we needed your support and we started our pre-orders, you were there to buoy us up again. Over 90% of you opted to spend extra money on the Special Edition and for that, we can’t thank you enough. We promised to give you special supporters something in return, and we’re finally at that point.

So it’s with great pleasure that today we take the next step in our open development and partnership with you. On Monday, July 26th, we will be releasing the NS2 Playable Alpha to all the Special Edition pre-orderers, on Steam. Like with NS1, this is not the complete game, this is the first of many versions. Here’s what you can expect on that day:

NS2 Alpha 1 content

• One of our shipping maps (ns2_tram), plus some smaller “test” maps
• Marine, with Rifle, Pistol, SwitchAx, Grenade Launcher (oops, and shotgun!)
• Skulks, Gorges, Lerks and their basic movement abilities and weapons
• Marine armory “buy” screen for purchasing new equipment
• Alien evolution menu for choosing your lifeform and upgrades
• Basic marine and alien commander interfaces including MACs, Drifters
• Much of our final sounds, artwork, animations, etc.

Natural Selection 2 will be available for Purchase on Steam.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/

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