Natural Selection 2

The best team-based shooter I have ever played. And, the worst. Incredible soaring highs and devastatingly brutal lows. A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ toxic community that is NOT newbie friendly, and that's because a bad player can ruin a match. But because this dead game is dead, they will begrudgingly help you if you're earnest to learn; for the have no one else.

Morale in this game is absolutely essential. I have seen defeat snatched from the jaws of victory because of the underdogs' perseverance and teammates' toxicity. You can tell when things collapse for the other team on the battlefield, and it's verified when players return to the lobby and you hear a litany of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and finger-pointing. The dopamine hits HARD then.

When you start you will not be good. You will be terrible, and lost. My tip to you is to destroy resource towers. Do not stop for any reason. You will lose 1v1 battles constantly. But go back, and destroy res. Keep doing that and you will win the game for your team, yet no one will thank you. But it will be crucial for victory.

You know you're doing well when you, a low-ranking player who is hitting res, draws the attention of the top-tier players. They will be sent after you, the grunt. That's when things turn, because the opportunity cost for them to guard resources is much more than your loss of life when they kill you and keep coming back. Keep it up.

And never stop.

And then you will know why this dead game will never die.

most goated game of all time. but yea every game from this era has an insane asylum of gamers who never stopped playing the whole time and their lives got worse, and worse, and they haunt the servers like a spectre.
what stops me from casually playing is the premium queue system where you have to manually refresh til that empties then you can join normal queue

Really great game, I wish I played more when it was still active. There is bots so you can still get a taste of what it was like. Most the fun was had when your team was throwing though. Add me if you wanna play sometime.

if u have past trauma and feel at home in a community of narcissists then this is the community for u.

This game started as a mod for half life 1 as Natural Selection 1, and grew into this very robust standalone that can be quite the engaging fusion of RTS and FPS in a very team oriented experience with a lot of diverse strategies and unique ways to play between the marines and the aliens.

Despite the glowing endorsement however, I must also say that this game is an artifact now, not an active experience. If you ever want to actually play it as intended, you need to find a community elsewhere planning on diving into it together, hosting a closed private server, because there is no consistent active quality control or moderation invested in this title anymore.

What it is however, is a landmark in the beautiful progression of refinement and development that eventually lead to subnautica, and if you watch the history of the developers influence from their inspiration from xen in half life into the concepts that formed natural selection, the path you can trace is a fascinating one. That is not really relevant to this game specifically however.

What IS relevant, is that if the developers made this title free to play, and designated someone to go around and get different twitch streamers to host community nights of the game, and included a system of premium cosmetics to still earn some side income to keep the process an even break, then it could see a resurgence of engagement that could be a fun little burst of celebration of a classic series many people don't truly know the depths of how influential it's development was on so many fronts.

This could be done in tandem with the announcement of the development of a potential future game:

NATURAL SELECTION: HAZARD SQUAD

the idea is to tie in a squad based repeatable scenario multiplayer focused (with single player + bots capacity) where a specialized (and highly customizable) squad of elite mercenaries is sent to various locations throughout the galaxy to deal with hostile alien problems.

This could also be tied into the subnautica universe to draw in the much larger crowd familiar with the subnautica games, and also give nods to the history of influence throughout unknown worlds development over the many years.

I have a LOT more i could say on the concept in great detail privately to the developers if interested, but the general formula would be:

squads of 1 - 6 players in PvE experiences (with unfilled slots occupied by support robots, not human avi's) where they are dropped into an area to quell various out of control local invasive alien life forms

I have an excessive amount of environments and scenarios in specific, but the core appeal is the ability to customize your mercenary while also being able to que for public lobbies or make pre-mades with friends, while also having a decent capacity to go it alone with a squad of all robots if you really wanted too.

Completed missions would result in payouts, and these payouts can be used to buy better equipment that makes excursions more likely to succeed for the cost of investment and potential loss of the equipment if not taken back aboard the players ship

The "highest difficulty" missions will include "evolved hostiles" as a modifier, meaning that after the first few minutes of the start of a higher reward higher difficulty mission, players can solo que into the "invasive species" que or whatever you wanna call it, and join ongoing hard mode missions stealthily as evolved hunters.

This gives something for the "way too good at video games" crowd who don't play cooperatively with others something to do, while also making the high payout high risk missions actually terrifying and dangerous because at any point until completion they could encounter human played highly dangerous and crafty hostile entities.

There are supporting systems to incentivize those ques as well I have in mind and a whole bunch of active limited time alerts, and live events and blah blah blah along with a Natural Selection 3 segway etc etc

Look i'm just lousy with ideas and ways to make it all happen bit by bit, budget by budget, quarter by quarter, just DM me for my endless stream of gold, I live in an eternal vortex of clear ideas and paths and nowhere to direct it, I'm going insane not having an outlet for even one percent of my capacity and potential and my cursed frail human body is so exceptionally incapable of doing anything beyond writing and talking, please someone save me from this prison of inaction and mundanity.

Ahem, anywho, Natural Selection 2, be an alien and crawl through vents and evolve with resources, or be a marine and stand around terrified, waiting for some invisible monster to bite your head off, while getting paid i imagine is like.. $5.00 an hour or something, wishing you had scored higher on the federation navy exams. Or you can try being a commander, and get blamed entirely for every small problem or shortcoming while your desperately trying to recall how RTS's function since it's been a decade or more since you played starcraft that one weekend.

Honestly thoe, the wild stories this game tells each time you play and the sheer chaos of it all when you actually have a populated server and nobody is cheating or some sort of super soldier god gamer who is three full teams on their own, can be really really memorable just as it exists now. You just need to do some work to put together a planned group to play it since, the likelyhood of finding a populated server without bots is minimal, and even more minimal that the quality will be worth the effort if you do.

And thanks for the wonderful memories unknown worlds <3 keep being awesome and creative as usual

An excellent game, really nothing scratches that itch of team coordination of the old early 2000s era commander-infantry style games nowadays. Every team based multiplayer game nowadays nobody speaks a whisper and everybody mutes all chat or the devs do it for you.
Natural selection 2 was one of those games where on each team you had at least 1 person on mic every game, usually the commander when building structures or helping out his little troops dropping some ammo/meds while leading his team.
Now as for the caveats. This game will filter you if you are new, especially today since it stopped being updated 2 years ago. And the only people who play the game nowadays are hardcore veterans that while mostly friendly to newcomers, will just chainkill you over and over again no mercy. There are support roles for aliens and marines that mitigate this somewhat but when servers are generally empty and the games you do get result in you getting stomped its tough.
Even through all that you can really tell this game was made with passion and It will always be one of my favourite games despite its current state.

the game is awsome but the only thing i despise are the toxic players and that my screen goes black everytime i load the game (i have to reinstal the game every time)