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Natural Selection For Half-Life Overhauled
Entropius writes "Natural Selection, a free Half-Life mod that contains elements of both traditional first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, has just gotten a complete overhaul with the release of version 2.0. In a nutshell, it combines the best elements of StarCraft and Counter-Strike. NS 2.0 adds new alien abilities, commander interface changes, changes to the resource model, four new maps, and more flexibility in alien evolutions. It's a whole new game now, and a blast to play... one of the most innovative new mods in a long time. The mirrors are straining to keep up, but here's a list of download links via readyroom.org." Update: 08/01 14:43 GMT by S : Here's a very necessary BitTorrent link, thanks to commenters.
I also noticed that (NS is incredible, but is limited by the ancient HL engine imho).
My Guess is it, that it's mostly the great number of HL installs out there and the much larger audience that stems from there.
Could also be the better support by valve and the bigger modding community overall.
Q3 ofcourse is a much more flexible engine than HL, but i cant really comment on the differences of modding in detail.
The methods of modding etc. should be pretty similar, since the HL engine was branched of somewhere between Quake1 and Quake2, but still uses most of the same basic concepts.
To be more exact, its not Half-life beating all the others, its just Counter-strike. Noone plays HL multiplayer.
I've been playing NS since 1.0 came out last October, and it's been my favorite HL mod besides The Specialists. I've been waiting for 2.0 (then called 1.1) for quite a few months, but I'm a bit disappointed with it. I thought it would be the huge upgrade that would turn NS into the mod to end all mods, but it's basically just a set of tweaks with some new features and 4 new maps. I'm not complaining, but I was expecting something.. bigger.