Important before playing: In order for you to play tonight, you'll need to redeem a Steam code that enables the Special Edition black armor and grants you access to the alpha. We will be e-mailing you these codes and instructions at approximately 6pm PDT (GMT-7).

You may be able to download NS2 before you get this e-mail, but you'll get an error message if you try to play before entering this code for the first time. You will only have to do this once and it's only for the alpha.

Note: If you haven't gotten your key yet, you can get it fast by going here.

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Hey everyone!

It's been an utterly insane couple of months of work here at Unknown Worlds and tonight many of you will get your first game of NS2!

Two weeks ago, when we announced our plans for releasing the alpha, we knew we had a ton of work to do. But we also knew that most of the core game was working, we just had to pull it all together. We've been working so hard for so long on this game, we just knew we could do it.

Hive room battle

Tonight you will get the first play of what will ultimately become Natural Selection 2. It is crucial that you know that this is an alpha and it has problems. Our hit-registration has major problems which we were unable to fix in time for tonight. We had to pull the "crag" at the last minute. Skulks can't fit through some vents. Lerk flight doesn't feel right. You might see some dev textures in places. Performance still needs work. So it is not without blemishes, nor did we expect it to be.

Releasing an alpha at this stage is a pretty different model then what the "big guys" would ever consider doing. This isn't like getting the beta of TF2 a couple weeks before it's released. This is getting in on the game when normally only developers would see it - we've even put in the ability for you to give feedback directly into the game and we hope you use it.

However, we do believe it has the core essence of the game in it. There are marines and claws and commanders and resources. Players take on a variety of roles and attack the enemy while jabbering away over their microphones in beautiful, atmospheric sci-fi environments. We wouldn't dream of releasing a game at this state to the public, but we insist on releasing it to you, our die-hard supporters. We are doing this for a few reasons:

• ...it serves as a "thank you" for supporting us, by letting you play before the public
• ...allows us to take your feedback while it's still easy enough to make changes
• ...the game will get much better, much faster
• ...it generates publicity and financing for our company to keep us independent

So what you will play tonight doesn't have a lot in it. It definitely does not have the gameplay that NS v1.0 did. There are only a few weapons, aliens, stripped down commander role and one map. But we think it will serve all the purposes above, and serve them well.

Hive room

It's with this in mind that we ask you to be kind and generous with your feedback. Of course we want you to be honest too, but we want you to realize that this is only the very first version, of many many versions to come. We released dozens of versions of NS1 and now that we're on Steam, we expect to release even more of NS2. We expect to ship a new version every week or two, all the way through alpha, beta, v1.0 and afterward. NS1 had a long life and we expect NS2 to do the same.

This is the beginning of a long and rewarding journey, and tonight, we all take the first step together. We hope you enjoy playing as much as we do making it. See you tonight!