Natural Selection 2

[Destroid]

Played the hell out of this tonight. I'm even starting to warm up to the alien commander, who feels a lot more like another alien on the team, rather than the master in control of things. Haven't had this much fun in videogames in a long, long time. I think my favourite map is still the NS1 port, Veil.

The alien commander really has quite a surprisingly array of abilities to use with each of his chambers have triggerable defensive abilities and some of them being mobile. He can take a very pro-active role in a battle.

 

[Metro]

So how big is the community (concurrent number of games)?

 

[Destroid]

Daily peak is close to 7000 players, minimum seems to be around 4000.

Metro

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

 

[Metro]

Thanks.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Got my first shot at being a marine commander when the game I joined absolutely no one had any interest in commanding, apparently. Lost the round (Unsurprisingly) but made a pretty decent go of it. Fully researched all the techs and even had a good exo push. If everyone was coordinating with microphones (Nobody was using them) we might've had a shot of it. Eventually lost when the alien team out-resourced us and was able to spam onos faster than we were able to spam exos/good weapons. Aliens were being really good about harassing our expansion attempts and had map control the entire game, despite us getting a secondary base and a few resource nodes.

Then the next round I ended up on alien team and absolutely no one wanted to be commander again and I didn't feel like losing it for my team again so I ignored it. We got some new guy as commander and didn't get a resource node outside the base a good 10+ minutes past the start of the round, and didn't get an evolution until probably 15+ minutes. By the time we got leap the marines had exos. So I guess I can say I did better than that as commander at least!
Still really enjoying it. The way the game feels between alien and marine teams is completely different, and playing as a commander is different from that. While you can pull up a map and see where your buildings/teammates are as a player, you don't really get a sense for the map control shit that a commander does by looking at nothing BUT that. Hopefully it keeps a healthy community going but I'm not sure it will. Indie multiplayer games (And multiplayer games in general nowadays) have a hell of a time holding players. Still, it's good enough that it deserves it.

 

[Metro]

Yeah that's a problem I imagine. If I played I'd have zero interest in being a commander.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Yeah that's a problem I imagine. If I played I'd have zero interest in being a commander.

It usually isn't an issue, most of time there's someone interested in playing commander and (Most of the time) they're decent to good. That server and more specifically every team I joined just didn't. I even like playing commander alright (Would play one occasionally in NS1, BF2, and BF2142) but the painful part is the first few games as commander where you're fucking your team as you fumble around to figure out how to get shit done. Took me forever to realize phase gate tech was researched from observatories.

 

[Destroid]

Hopefully it keeps a healthy community going but I'm not sure it will. Indie multiplayer games (And multiplayer games in general nowadays) have a hell of a time holding players. Still, it's good enough that it deserves it.

It's been pretty easy to get a game for the last year or so through beta, NS has very dedicated fans, and don't forget that NS1 was the third most popular HL1 mod for a very long time, right behind team fortress classic and counter strike. I think it will be easier to get commanders in NS2 than 1, the alien commander is very chilled out play, and while the marine commander is a lot more intense, it's really nothing like the massive burden of responsibility the commander had in NS1. One also mustn't underestimate the satisfaction of winning as commander, you become much more invested in the experience.

I don't even mind if the commanders or players suck, the most important thing to having a good time in NS2 is if people talk and cooperate.

 

[Elim]

I was good at NS1 and now i suck, i'm too slow and the mouse sensitivity feels always wrong.
I just keep playing slow games.

 

[Blaine]

I was good at NS1 and now i suck, i'm too slow and the mouse sensitivity feels always wrong.
I just keep playing slow games.

Don't sweat it. You just need practice. When I was playing Tribes: Ascend, after about 500+ hours of near-daily pub matches (usually 5-10, with marathons on weekends) I was very good. After about 1000+ hours, I was very, very good.

Then I went vacationing in Hatteras for a week, was too busy to play for another week, and those two weeks off were enough to severely atrophy my ability to play T:A well. It took me almost a week to fully recover and start improving again.

 

[Volrath]

Really fucking awesome game.

 

[Blaine]

Really fucking awesome game.

Yep. It requires and rewards personal skill, requires communication and teamwork, the skill ceiling is extremely high, the teams are very distinct, and the sci-fi setting is a plus.

 

[Kane]

Fucking love it. My only complaint is performance related but they've already said that they're going to patch that.

I don't think I can stomach another Planetside.

 

[Blaine]

The official FAQ states that a great deal of effort was put into optimizing the game, and that Unknown Worlds intended it to run well on average machines. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case. On a wide range of Internet message boards, and even among my Steam friends list, people with average machines are complaining about optimization issues on medium or low settings. Having a slightly outdated CPU or a mobility graphics card vastly increases your odds of experiencing issues.

I'm fortunate in that my PC is well above average and runs the game at a constant 60 FPS at max settings (and it had better, because I won't play choppy multiplayer shooters), but I assure you I'm not sitting pretty. Other people's problems affect the entire community. Unknown Worlds need to optimize NS2 quickly before people upset by the game's performance issues move on and miss out.

 

[Destroid]

I wonder what causes the problems, unfortunately for me I'm quite badly effected because I have an old CPU, the FPS is fine (about the same as UE3 games) if I'm just strolling around the map with another guy or two nearby, but if I get into a big fight with 5+ or worse 10+ players nearby it really kills the frames, maybe it has something to do with their netcode and prediction? It also seems to degrade after an hour or two of playing, possibly leaking memory too.

But even if I get 10fps in a fight, I'm still decent and still love the game.

 

[Metro]

Well, how old are we talking about? The minimum requirements call for a GPU with at least a gig of memory.

 

[Destroid]

My GPU is strong enough for any settings (Radeon HD6850) but I have a 2.3ghz Core 2 Duo which is below their listed minimum spec.

 

[Blaine]

From what I've read on their forums, the game is CPU-intensive due to .lua scripts running for each player, or something along those lines.

 

[Metro]

Yep, eventually it's your CPU that's going to bottleneck things. You actually have me beat on most antiquated CPU as mine is a 2.8 Ghz! Of course, my GPU is just as dated, too. Upgrading to a modest i7 sans new GPU (just using your current one) probably wouldn't be too costly.

 

[Destroid]

From what I've read on their forums, the game is CPU-intensive due to .lua scripts running for each player, or something along those lines.

Lot's of games use lua. Cryengine and DoW2 off the top of my head, andnow I think about it, Crysis is a CPU hog too. But I doubt either of those games use it as extensively as NS2 does.

 

[Average Manatee]

From what I've read on their forums, the game is CPU-intensive due to .lua scripts running for each player, or something along those lines.

Lot's of games use lua. Cryengine and DoW2 off the top of my head, andnow I think about it, Crysis is a CPU hog too. But I doubt either of those games use it as extensively as NS2 does.

It could be written in brainfuck for all it matters. If the game is running slow it's the programmers fault, not the language.

 

[Blaine]

It could be written in brainfuck for all it matters. If the game is running slow it's the programmers fault, not the language.

Not necessarily. Some games are very CPU-intensive and there's very little the game's developers can do about it.

Case in point: X³: Reunion, a space sim that's extremely script-heavy. There are thousands of computer-controlled starships and space stations active in the universe at any given time, plus the engine is older and designed to run on a single core only. Hence, for a while people without the latest CPUs experienced issues. I've heard Dwarf Fortress, a game with ASCII graphics for fuck's sake, is CPU-intensive enough to slow down even some fairly recent PCs.

 

[Destroid]

Dwarf Fortress' code is an example of the programming being responsible. I'm sure a rewrite could improve its performance several times over. Even the developer doesn't fully understand how all his code works, and Toady isn't a programmer by trade, but a math academic.

 

[TripJack]

some fairly recent PCs he says

fps death is inevitable in dorf fortress

 

[Average Manatee]

It could be written in brainfuck for all it matters. If the game is running slow it's the programmers fault, not the language.

Not necessarily. Some games are very CPU-intensive and there's very little the game's developers can do about it.

Case in point: X³: Reunion, a space sim that's extremely script-heavy. There are thousands of computer-controlled starships and space stations active in the universe at any given time, plus the engine is older and designed to run on a single core only. Hence, for a while people without the latest CPUs experienced issues. I've heard Dwarf Fortress, a game with ASCII graphics for fuck's sake, is CPU-intensive enough to slow down even some fairly recent PCs.

That's not the game being slow, that's the game trying to do a lot. NS2 is not doing a lot, it should not be significantly slower than every other FPS in a small map.

Dwarf fortress at least has the excuse that it's a huge unique project of one person which actually has to do a lot of logic and AI. NS2 is an FPS. FPSes have been done a thousand times before, there is no excuse for NS2 being CPU heavy with such small areas and so little going on. The problem probably boils down to them using their own in-house engine instead of an already proven one, but that is speculation.