I've mentioned this game a few times now. But in the past few weeks I've seen this game become a playable beta. So I've decided to write about it as I feel its at a stage were other people can appreciate it. Its not a review and I'm not going to talk much about the game itself. This is about how the team got to were they are today and how you can follow the teams development as the game is slowly pieced together. Ill include a video at the end that just got release showing game play. So if your interested go and buy it and get access to the beta.
The team (Unknown Worlds) originally made Natural Selection 1 as a mod for Half-Life. It was a massive success and unlike most other mod teams, that made there sequels on the source engine after Hal-Life 2 was released, they decide to go ahead and make there game from scratch, on there own engine! A feat in itself, but with only four developers this project felt like it could have a film written about it.
There attitude towards there community had always been open. These guys relay appreciate all the support the players have given them over the years. They also realised that it was a wealth of criticism and feedback that they could tap into if the players had a hold of there game. As the team was short on money, they couldn't afford to employ testers and Q/A groups. So instead they started taking pre-orders with the promise of early alpha assess to special edition owners. They also get exclusive in-game black armour, ohhhhhhh...
After the alpha was finally release after many of updates on there website showing off lots of models and concepts and map ideas. With video reveals of some of the alien classes, public testing could start. This was important as the engine was new and had never been tested before with clients joining from all over the world. As you may of guessed it dint work to well. But astonishingly UW had been able to release updates weekly over steam. Sometimes even more than one a week! Just recently they dropped the bomb that they were moving to beta stage. This would give all the people that pre-ordered the standard edition access to the game and closed beta access would be given to the next 10.,000 pre-orders. Obviously they were running out of money again. Plus the alpha was in no state to be handed out to even more player. Especially those that may not appreciate if being in such a raw state. But miraculously when the patch came out it had addressed so many of the bugs that was creating severe lag on servers and low fps on people PCs it actually became playable.
At the time of writing, the game is getting there. There still releasing updates to address problems, so allot of the features are still to be implemented. But even at this early stage its still a crap load of fun.
http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/ this is the community site that has a real time progress page along side the news page. Is shows all the features and bug fixes there adding into the next patch. As-well as a forum and twitter updates etc. Have a dig around and figure out what this game is all about.
This is the official Beta game-play video. So check it out. Click the video to go to the official youtube channel were theirs more videos.
THIS link goes to a fan made channel, and has lots of videos explaining how to play the game as well as lots of game-play on both the alien and marine sides.
For me even though this game is really good, that's not the reason I love it so much. The fact that you can follow along with the devs makes it all the more interesting.I cant wait till its finished!
