Quoting: starfarerWhile I never quite got into Natural Selection 2 the way I got into Natural Selection I think that Natural Selection 2 is the game Flayra and Unknown Worlds always wanted Natural Selection 1 to be. I think they wanted a very spooky, asymmetric aliens vs humans shooter but Natural Selection 1 got very streamlined and there were a lot of professional players. Being swallowed by an Onos wasn't really terrifying, it was more of a nuisance.
Now take Natural Selection 2 where the light can go out and dynamic infestation covers the level it was a completely different experience.

For some ungodly reason they decided to implement quite a bit of the game in Lua. I imagine this might be one of the reasons why the performance was terrible in the beginning. Well, maybe I am mistaken.

I really miss the Natural Selection of old, though.

Well, the spooky lighting and stuff was a great idea and I'm sure attracted a lot of players at first, but because the game is highly competitive, it really doesn't matter what lighting is there. Most of the players in the end will tweak their drivers and monitor settings to kill all of that. Quake 3 is a great example - the difference between the "best graphics" option with gritty textures and moody lighting (by 1999 standards) is sooooooo far from the "competitive" option that was made mostly through series and series of console commands, that its unbelievable.

Haven't played the first game, but saw some matches and heard a lot of stories. I love more pronounced commander roles in the second - it really separates the game from the competition in this regard and lets the strategy part shine I believe. But it makes the entry potentially messy - without good commander a new player can't learn the flow of the game and the commander role is mostly a mystery to everyone.

The main problem was that they decided to write their own ENGINE for the game, forget about Lua :) Lua was an okay call, I think. The misallocation of resources on the engine was bad. They've said that there were no engines at that time that could do dynamic lighting and some other things they wanted. So, in a funny way, this exact artistic thing about lighting that we remember, that's arguably not really important in a competitive setting, is the thing that made them spend some millions on a development of an engine. And because they spent more time on the engine development (instead of writing on Unreal or whatever), the game lacked all sorts of optimizations. They are a great studio, but I feel that they becoming even more focused on the artistic stuff and Subnautica is a good example - it's great visually and from a story perspective, but the mechanics are undercooked and/or just annoying without heavy modding.

They have plans to re-release NS2 somewhat after they will deal with the automatic matchmaking (it is already complete, I believe). It may spark some interest in the subgenre, so Unvanquished and others may benefit from it all.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I was very active in the Natural Selection 2 online play for some years until one particular server that I frequented devolved into turbo-mode toxicity from a group of oldtimers that should've been banned years ago. The gameplay being very sensitive to ping, I had no options after that and I burnt out, somewhat. I knew about other games in this space (FPS-Strategy subgenre) and even tried some of them, but they never clicked for me. Nevertheless, I was interested in this remake after reading about it previously on this very site and tried it. It has interesting game design nuggets and I enjoyed some features, but alas the core features like gunplay was meh at best. Human soldiers have a pea-shooter basically for a pistol, bullets are very slow to move (while aliens are very fast) and it hits like nothing happened, also the shooting speed is very slow. Sound design doesn't help, because it does this pew-pew sound, and it makes shooting a very comical experience. Very comical, but sad - you're a white clown in this - not the red-and-funny-one, but a sad-and-failing-one - you have a pea shooter for a pistol in an Alien setting and you fall constantly.

From the alien side you have a constant screen reorientation (like in Aliens vs Predator game of old) when you change the surface. Basically, if you start crawling on the ceiling after the jump, the screen rotates 180 degrees and you see it as if you're walking on the ceiling with your head being lower than your legs. That design is traditional somewhat, but if you're not accustomed to it (and most of the people aren't) it quickly becomes just barf-city with constant disorientation and a very steep learning curve I suspect. NS2 threw this out the window from the start - you always see the scene as if you're standing on the ground, even if you're crawling on the ceiling or a wall and it plays much-much better in the end, although with very fast aliens it can get very disorienting very fast anyway.

I am very happy that both projects have some afterlife support - NS2 is being very slowly patched by the community but it's not open source which is very sad and they've dropped the linux support some years ago. Sad emojis here. Unvanquished being open source and a remake of Tremulous is in a great state and very playable (I played with bots because there was no one playing it), but I'm afraid that the core design and gameplay is old and needs to change, really. Tremulous lost to the Natural Selection in the end, and the sequel (NS2) is not really that popular (but it has somewhat cult following and a steady online presence), so I hope that there will be some re-imaging and borrowing from other more successful projects in the subgenre so it would survive and prosper. The guys from Unknown Worlds (better known for Subnautica) made very drastic design changes to the gameplay in NS2, left many oldtimers unhappy. The original Natural Selection was much closer to Tremulous. But in the end the sequel survived so many years and is still being played. That's no small thing and many lessons could be learned from their successes and failures.

Also, I encourage anyone to share some other examples of fps-strategy team games with asymmetrical gameplay. That's a very rare cocktail that I love to drink and explore and I'm sure many people may be interested in knowing that such thing exist :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Liam DawePlease note: store wars are not allowed here. I'm keeping the comments up this time, so people are again aware. It is however against our rules to do these drive-by "i'm not interested" comments. It's annoying. No one needs to know you won't buy at a particular store, next time just scroll by. It doesn't add to any healthy discussion.

Yeah, Store Wars are going down in quality. I liked episodes 5-7 very much, though. Other ones are not that good. But the episodes 4123-9000+ are just plain bad!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestI really don't get people supporting Manjaro: ok, you are not good enough to install Arch but why Manjaro?
Apart from their various security screwups over the years, and that shady thing with Asahi, their approach to packages management and the AUR is weird... also they hold packages back for two weeks for no actual reason.
Why people don't use something like archinstall or EndeveourOS instead of Manjaro?

This is tangential, but I thought that it's interesting to explore, so here's my couple of cents.

I'm somewhat lazy in regards to tinkering/fixing/modifying stuff on my home system despite being a programmer for many years. I have a couple of things that I care about that I modify/patch (the dreaded "on release, not press" xkb bug that is 18 years old and will never be fixed), and that's basically locks me in the Arch territory, Ubuntu may have some PPA with this xserver patch still, but I'm not sure now. Also it locks me in the X11 dinosaur-land forever, because it's not even considered a bug in Wayland projects. Sorry for this tangent, but I need to cry about it, even programmers have feelings.

So I'm lazy, but I may have a slight obsession with doing something right and proper as you can see. Because this xkb thing is not right and a travesty of a protocol. As is some Manjaro's team moves that are critiqued everywhere around the globe (some of that you've already pointed out). So it sets me up for a move to Arch-proper or any other derivative, naturally, and I thought about it multiple times. The thing is - I'm not sure that I will get much more by doing this move, besides some new headaches and pains along the way. I will move definitely if Manjaro's team will do some major f-up that will really piss me off, but not in the near future I believe.

Also, trying to answer this question from a different perspective: I think there's a PR problem going on. Manjaro is positioned as a newbie friendly distro with some caveats. They are very effective with their collaborations (in Arm space for example) and their PR. Arch is not only shouts everywhere that it's not newbie friendly, it somewhat prides itself in that. Installing Arch is a rite of passage of some sort and the absolute majority of people will stay far-far away from this, of course. Do you want to experience a nice meal in a restaurant, even if there's some comments that this restaurant's management and courses may be dodgy or not as good as they seem, or maybe you want to experience the thrill of hunting a wild boar that may break your leg and bite your hand off if you're not up to task? The average user is not ready for the hunt. He's already sold on the idea that Manjaro is a packaged meal while Arch is Gentoo in disguise with poisoned darts and spike traps from Prince of Persia. Something like that.

Also, I think that it may be more productive to ask this question in another way: why is it, given that Manjaro's team are such amateurs, their distribution got so popular? How did they managed to secure the backing, sponsorships, maintainers and users? What could be learned from them?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: anewsonwishlisted this, I like the genre and it looks like a lot of fun.

Quoting: denyasisNo need to wishlist it. It's free and OpenSource (I think the assets might be closed, but are freely available with the Open source download). It includes the DLC. Pretty sure the GitHub link is pinned on the Steam forum.

Edit, here you go: https://github.com/BlindMindStudios/StarRuler2-Source [External Link]

Builds just fine for me and is genuinely a really good game. It definitely experimented with some new ideas, which I think turned out pretty good.

There's also this project, lead by the most productive modder in the community. It's newer, but it doesn't run for me for some reason (but I'm a noob, so that's expected)
https://github.com/OpenSRProject/OpenStarRuler [External Link]

You need to buy the game, though, to have music for example.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Very good article and very important questions raised. I would love to see more redeeming articles about such injustices.

Speaking about the balancing act of the review system, I have a counter example: when some game receiving a mixed rating is "not enough" for me. In one particular instance the developer never delivered on his promises, abandoned the game in an alpha state and moved on to the next game, leaving the unofficial modders to pick up the slack. It seems that this "was enough" in the end, because he stopped producing games, but at the cost of three abandoned titles with broken promises, forum bans and constant backpedaling. Not naming any names, I'm sure the developer got his fill of harassment (with or without quotation marks) online.

And speaking about injustices: I can't get out of my head the sad story of Star Ruler 2 developers. It was not an easy game to jump into, because they innovated on the 4x/grand strategy formula and made a bunch of systems and game mechanics that were never seen in this genre as far as I know. And once it clicked, it was (and still is) the best game that I've played in this genre. Years later Stellaris showed the world how popular realtime 4x can be, but it was very late, because the indie studio that made Star Ruler 2 was closed already. They said that the press was not interested and many people didn't know what to make of it, partly because it was straying far away from the established formula, despite some very glowing reviews by established reviewers at the time. They made their custom game engine in C (!!!) with heavy scalability and multithreading in mind (and native linux support), they made one DLC after that, went broke and was struggling for a job for a long time. Open-sourced the game a couple of years after that, so you can check it... and maybe even help me install it, because I'm struggling with it for some reason.

Sorry if I got carried away with my writing, I hope that someone will find it at least a bit interesting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments