With the summer sale now in full swing, we decided to take a lighter approach to the update this week. Minor tweaks and improvements over last week’s patch should address some of the feedback we heard. Moving forward, we are adjusting our patch cycle to be bi-weekly. This allows us to start tackling some larger features and helps with our testing schedule.

As many of you know and for those of you that don’t, each update to NS2 comes with not just hours of development time but lots of bug and gameplay testing. Our playtesters are community volunteers and give many hours each week so that you can enjoy the fruits of our labors. Our EU Playtest Lead Asraniel has …

Happy Summer Marines! We are ushering in the sunshine with update 303. This is a lighter patch focused on some bug fixes and a couple tweaks and additions to the game. With this update we are introducing a new post-round feedback system, this will help provide us with more details about your games and comparing round data to support future changes.

The last six months has seen a lot of changes and experimentation to the game and we aren’t done yet. We are working on developing plans over the next week to continue to build on the new foundation that we’ve created over these last few months. Be on the lookout for some exciting new opportunities and changes to come.…

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 …

“THIS IS ALTERRA!” First off, how amazing is it that we are at Update 300? The blood sweat and tears that have been poured into this game by so many people over the last few years is nothing short of awesome. Now we look forward to what’s to come.

This update sees us making continued improvements to the server browser and an additional notification for news or updates on first open. After playing many games, reading and discussing feedback with players we’ve made some additional tweaks to newly introduced abilities and weapons. Aliens now have a new ability in Focus, so play around and see what you think. Also on the map front Derelict has seen some performance improvements, thanks …

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 …

Without doubt the community is what makes Natural Selection 2 so unique and special.

The passion of many community members goes beyond the game and lets them start projects to support this community and the game in every possible way. Many of those projects have influenced Natural Selection 2 in various ways but sadly often didn’t got the attention they deserve.

So it’s time to give those projects some spotlight. Now without further delay I’ll let Pelargir introduce his current project NS2News.org:

Let me introduce myself first, I’m Pelargir and I’m typing up this post to present you our latest project: NS2News.

So what is NS2News ? For those who haven’t heard about it yet, NS2News is a …

Hi everyone.

One of the things we’re actively trying to improve is the way we communicate with the community. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to reach us and each other.

As well as continuing to use Trello, we’ve started up a new Trello Board for our activities to allow you to follow our development progress. We will continue to use the forum and this development blog to post announcements and interact, but we think there is now a new faster, more fluid way we can communicate in the future.

Discord is a relatively new chat & voice service. It’s a combination of Slack, Skype & Teamspeak all in one. We’ve been testing if …

Thanks to hard-yakka by McGlaspie and other Community Development Team members, a new Natural Selection 2 ‘build machine‘ is up and running. This means prototype builds of new version of NS2 are going to start popping out very soon!

Naturally, new builds will volunteers to test, poke and prod them. This is a great opportunity to contribute to and influence the shape of future version of NS2. Fill out the application form today!

This is an exciting time in the life of NS2. Over the past few months, development has lain dormant as new build infrastructure was prepared. A call for volunteer playtesters is a sign that the volcano is rumbling……

When the Reinforcement Program launched, it was impossible to upgrade from one tier to another. The reasons for this restriction are various and mostly technical: In an ideal world, we would allow anyone to upgrade any tier at any time.

The funds raised by the Reinforcement Program have directly supported Natural Selection 2 development: They helped pay for the two most recent updates, Build 258 and 259, and have covered a small portion of the cost of the Eclipse remake. This is very cool, because it means that committed NS2 players are making this game better in a very real way.

Of all the Reinforcement Program tiers, Shadow Tier is the most popular. However, a great many of …