After the successful construction of a new mining station on asteroid codename: Kodiak, the crew of the Industrial Construction Vessel “Caged” sent out a distress signal. ALTERRA Corp quickly dispatched a private military unit to investigate the source of the distress, what they found was an empty vessel and no signs of human life…

Welcome to Caged, the newest official map in the NS2 universe. A throwback to the original NS1 Map by Nelson ‘manah’ Ferryman, Flaterectomy and other community contributors and testers have worked to honor the original but also offer a new take for the current state of play. Caged offers players a fun four techpoint map with plenty of res and unique rooms and corridors for …

Aliens didn’t get all the love, though. Marines have also received some new toys and changes to their existing tech. A preliminary version of the Heavy Machine Gun (HMG) has been added. This is a gun that was loved in NS1 and one which many of us have always wanted to see make a return in NS2. The HMG was pioneered successfully in Comp Mod, and now it has made its way into the main game.

We’ve also heard your cries and beacons, and recognize that Contamination tended to be very frustrating for Marines. We’ve made some changes to how it works to give Marine players more time to react to it. It will now do its damage over time …

After the response and tracking of a lot of the changes we introduced last week we decided to continue with another update of shakeups. There are some minor adjustments to a few items from the patch after more feedback. Also new this week is a revamped server browser! We have been hard at work to create a better way to filter and sort the list and even provide more information to the user before choosing what server to connect too. Our week to week experiments and changes have been very interesting to watch and see what works and what doesn’t and we aren’t done just yet! Over the next couple weeks there are plans for some additional UI changes, maybe …

The room was eerily silent, even the normal white noise of the industrial facility seemed to vanish. I proceeded forward as ordered but something felt uneasy and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck begin to stand up. I continue to tell myself that I am a trained soldier and that I’ve encountered enough alien scum that nothing should surprise me, but still the unease raced across my body and the fear set in even more than before.

Suddenly I hear an all too familiar sound, one that can only be described as vacuumous vortex that death so quickly follows. I stand at the ready, shotgun in hand as I prepare for the Fade that I …

Fellow Chompers and Frontiersmen,

Today we introduce a new (small) gameplay change! One of our goals is to ‘shake up’ certain elements of gameplay- be it long standing balance issues, tech that has become obsolete, or barriers that cause excessive hardship to newer players. In update 294, we’re making what will be hopefully the first of several new gameplay tweaks.

We’re changing medpacks from 50 instant healing to 25 instant healing and 25 healing-over-time (the course of one second). Medpacks will still cost 1 res. What’s the point of splitting the healing like this, you ask?

The target of this change is excessive combat med spam. Currently it’s fairly common to med spam marines through engagements and one of the …

In our newest release we take a look back or should I say forward at marine Exo Suit. Our approach with this update was to improve the quality of life use for the Exo and the players interactions with using it. So suit up and join the fight against the alien scum and we’ll see you on the other side!

UPDATE NOTES

Tweaks / Improvements

• Exosuits have had a Quality of Life pass
  • While deploying, your view is no longer locked and you are frozen for less time to better match the animations
  • You can eject instantly, and it will throw you more in the direction you are looking. You can even use it to get to some vents!
  • Subnautica

Hi everyone!

It seems like only yesterday that we released update 288, wait a minute?!? It was 🙂 (almost). Hot off the heels of one update comes yet another. This time there is even more under the hood adjustments and tools for us to make the deployment of new features easier. The team has been discussing and debating many suggestions by the community on ways to adjust lifeforms and new player traps. We will continue to discuss and evaluate these over the next couple weeks. For now there are some minor adjustments you will see listed in the changelog, plus a handful of fixes and map repairs. See you all on the servers!

CHANGELOG

Tweaks / Improvements

• Added the ability

Hey everyone!

Part of our goal as a development team is to look at player retention for the long term, not just how we stand now. A lot of our focus on this lately starts with new players to the game. We have continued to make  changes to the game and mechanics in order to help new players better understand how to play NS2, while keeping the experience intuitive and fun. This patch is the first step in achieving these goals. We’ll likely be patching again later this week as we quickly move on to Patch 287 and beyond!

CHANGELOG

Tweaks / Improvements

• Added an Introduction to Natural Selection 2 video. It will play on first launch, and can be

Following on from the March and April entries, it is time to update Planet Earth on what is going on with Natural Selection 2. This is a retrospective look at development in May. To keep the length under control, (April’s entry was a bit overboard!) this post will stick to three topics: Environments, Technical, and Game. Let’s start with Biodome!

Environments

Michael, (‘Olmy’) has been cranking on Biodome. The map is striking, thanks to its new art set and ‘flora’ focus. The accompanying images show some of the stages environments go through, from idea (1, above), to rough 3d layouts (2, below), to texturing, lighting, detailing and prop placement (3, two below).

Biodome will be an absolute blast, but …