Well here’s a thing. Unknown Worlds is (mostly) moving on from excellent humans vs aliens multiplayer FPS Natural Selection 2. It’s a relatively small team, and Subnautica isn’t going to build itself. NS2, however, will. Sort of. A community dev team has been given UW’s official blessing, so expect to be gorging yourself on their creations soon. Details below.
Can any of us honestly say we have never dreamed of creating a beautiful garden from flesh and bone, bile and spit? I thought not. That’s the problem with these ‘Craft’ games: they tend to use everyday building materials like stone and metal. Give me great citadels of bone draped in banners of skin, the absurd excesses of heavy metal album covers come to virtual life. Or, failing that, GorgeCraft will do.
The mod turns Natural Selection 2 into a building sandbox, letting us cough up biological lumps and structures wherever we please as architects of oozing monstrosities. It left beta and launched over the weekend, and you can snag it from the Steam Workshop.
Half-Life begot the mod Natural Selection, which begot standalone sequel Natural Selection 2, which together with NS1′s Combat mode incestuously begot NS2′s Combat mod, which now begets standalone game Natural Selection 2: Combat. It’s all a bit like Chronicles with assault rifles.
Faultline Games are taking their Combat mod standalone, they’ve announced, expanding and polishing it up as one would expect. Combat’s a murder-oriented version of Natural Selection, focusing on the asymmetric humans vs. aliens FPS combat while doing away with RTS-y bits like resource-gathering and commanders. It also splashes in RPG-y levelling, with murder-earned skill points unlocking new weapons, tech, life forms and whatnot.