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Natural Selection Half-Life Mod Reaches 3.0 Beta
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the official Natural Selection page, where V3.0 Beta of the Half-Life mod "hybrid first-person/real-time strategy game" is now available. According to the page, changes include 10 new maps, as well as the addition of Natural Selection: Combat, a "...new fast and furious gameplay mode focusing on intense action. Combat games generally last less than ten minutes, and require very little knowledge to play." The mod can now be played using the add-on's "official Steam support", and will be "...listed under the 'My Games' section (not as a 3rd-party mod)", a laudable achievement for the Natural Selection developers, who've also implemented vital "skulk prediction fixes" for this update.
Although they say on their site that NS 3.0 supports Steam (which most players hate) and WonID, they don't make any mention about how to play it without Steam. The official Natural Selection forums are down right now, so this should help anyone trying to play the game without Steam. After downloading it and letting it install to your steam account directory, make a copy of the nsp directory and place it in your Half-Life dir. Same arguments apply for 3.0 as in 2.1, but replace the -game ns with -game nsp. Still though, I'm only able to see two active 3.0 public servers. Could be because it has gotten such an ill reception from the NS crowd, or maybe the clan servers are playing private for a bit. I would sure be interested in finding out what's up.
sigs are dumb.
kinda makes it hard to browse for info...
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Is it just me or is Valve trying to ruin their product with this crap so people will upgrade to whatever comes next? I haven't dusted off my HL cd since a long and painful encounter with steam which ended with what amounted to me deleting the directory because the uninstaller wouldn't work anymore.
Why play NS on Half Life when you can get the same style gameplay - only better in most of the C&C (Command & Conquer) series of games? :P
So, the Natural Selection mod. What's it all about? Is it good, or is it whack?
Me and my roomate downloaded and started playing this yesterday after we sat around wondering why nobody was playing WON NS we found out the beta came out.
Let me tell you. It is freakin' awesome. The game is nearing perfection. And the combat maps, which I was very skeptical ofl, are actually a ton of fun and very awesome. Great job NS guys.
On thing though. We were supposed to do a bunch of homework yesterday, but since NS came out our day was shot. I guess its all work and no play today.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
This is infact not the case at the moment, but it should be at a mystery date in the future when Valve actually do this. This might take several weeks/months though.
Natural selection is the best teamplay game in the world. The co-ordination that the marines need to win a round is second to none. The biggest problem with the game is noobs can fook it up for everyone. I think lowering the learning curve and adding more straight violence will simply bring the counter-strikers. What a shame :(
The answer is none: None more black.
Now thats finished, what other mods are there out there for Half-life that I can give a go? What do you recommend?
FWIW, I don't have access to the internet on my home PC so multi-player/internet games are completely out.
Thanks!
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Quoth the write-up:
Because that's just what the First Person Shooter genre needed: dumbing down.
Even in Beta, I think NS 3.0 is the best PC game out right now. It looks and plays better than the rest (yes, even though it is on the Half-Life engine) and NS:Combat is incredibly fun even if you don't feel like a full-fledged NS game.
The players agree-- within hours of release it rocketed above all but Counter Strike and Day of Defeat in the number of players.
And you can't beat the price-- free for anyone who has Half-Life (which is only $14 itself!).
-m
Only a human commander sees the top-down "strategy game" view. Everyone else in the game is playing a first-person shooter.
Dumbass.
I think that means relative to regular Natural Selection, which has a steep learning curve.
NS:Combat is easy because at the heart, it is a point-and-shoot game. What makes it fun is the RPG aspect. You get experience for kills (and for kills scored by nearby teammates!) and can spend those to level up through your own personal tech tree. The decisions you make there are important: will you go for heavy armor to be invulnerable to Lerk Spores, or buy a Jet Pack and take to the skies? Do you want to play defensively with trip Mines and Grenades, or get a Shotgun and charge? Or maybe you should hold back and get a Welder to repair your command chair.
-m
Play on regular servers if you want to play with ppl who do teamwork. myself, i play on Lunixmonster and the 3 Old Fogey servers [OldF] oldf.net. My handle is Niteowl. would be nice to see some slashdotters playing along side me :)
;)
Personally, i'm really happy that NS has combat is in. since there are quite a few NS servers out there that run COMBAT ONLY, you can basically use those as n00b magnets. Ppl who want furious gameplay/want to learn the game/can't guard an RT to save their life will go play combat. Those who want to play the RTS part of the FPS/RTS can play classic NS
A side note, this is still beta testing, so there is still some balancing to be done. IMHO, JPers need a more solid counter (now that lerks don't have spikes), and onii and fades with their new hitboxes, need something to buff them (they get shredded right quick).