The Death Of Combat
_Grendel_
Join Date: 2015-05-07 Member: 204238Members
Join Date: 2015-05-07 Member: 204238Members
Today is a sad day. It is the day the official final nail was put into NS2: Combat. It definitely didn't come as a surprise, in fact quite the opposite. It was a surprise that development lasted this long. But that doesn't make it any less sad. What's also sad is that the announcement past with very few people even noticing. Combat was a great game, just a victim of circumstances. But whats the saddest part is, we will never get to see all the neat stuff that the combat devs had planned. Rest in peace my friend. 
*EDIT*
*EDIT*
Teaser vid off combat's facebook page:
This would have been sooooo AWESOME. *goes and cries self to sleep*
This would have been sooooo AWESOME. *goes and cries self to sleep*
Comments
What's going to happen to the studio? Are they also shutting down
And yes indeed, so much cool stuff!!!
Justice for combat! Combat lives matter.
People will say that's impossible due to legal issues and blah blah blah but that's bullshit, 1 year ago the thought of ns2 being actively developed by UWE again was impossible, and it still happened. With all the money and effort being put into the game again there's no way in hell that NS2:Combat can't be reintegrated with ns2, it's just not a priority when it really should be, and the fact that it's not means tons of man hours and $ are being wasted.
It's honestly a shame, the guys at FLG and UWE really need to figure this shit out because otherwise most of the ns2 playerbase is missing out on something great.
On another note, whatever happened to that combat gather group? I've been wanting to play some combat but I haven't seen any going.
TLDR: FLG and UWE figure this shit out please and don't let a great game mode go to waste
From wikipedia:
@flayra you guys did NOTHING for this game, you did NOT fulfill your role as publisher - not even remotely. It was set up for failure before it was even released. I must say I reaalllllly liked UWE about 3 years ago, but my respect for them has declined slowly and slowly since and is now at an all-time low.
The community discussed this ad-nauseum when it was first announced that it would segregate our already shrinking player base. There seemed to be actually no thought from the "publishers" about how this would be handled. It was released, it segregated and shrunk our player base as was predicted, and then they (UWE) continued to do next to nothing to support it at/after release. There was NEVER any advertising that I ever saw saying anything about this game. A small interview before it was released by rock paper shotgun or kotaku or something was about the only time I've ever heard of ns2:combat outside of these forums and in game. Way to try to bring new players into the ns universe.
Furthermore, I think it's fair to say that FLGs development was outright HAMPERED by UWE staff who either refused to work on it at all or just gave 0 fks and sat on updates, etc. From what I am able to piece together, it seems there was almost no effort at any point on UWE's end to ever make NS2:C or FLG a success. A legitimate shame in my opinion. I've heard rumor ns2:c was supposed to get the engine update from the fast-load build, but since nobody on UWE's side would have anything to do with ns2:c, it never happened. FLG left in the dust (should i say wake?) again.
Nobody outside of the ns2 community even knew about/knows about the game. Those that did either left ns2 outright to play combat, then lost connection with both after the game had such a small playerbase/support; or they stopped playing ns2 altogether because they refused to pay the then $15 to play what they viewed as a mod they played for free in ns2 which was no longer available, and did not enjoy vanilla play enough to stick around.
Of course, this is pretty on par w/ UWE's track record for disappointment (Fall 2009). Game released w/ such bad performance, given up on like 18 mos after release, no prizes given to teams still YEARS after promised, no incentive whatsoever for any esports or pro level players to play the game since there are no tourneys (BLOWN opportunities to invigorate playerbase), no support (again). It's just been a constant sh!t show. Not to mention the icy process of dissolving CDT, the last saving grace of this community, to be put on what seems like some sort of trial to make or break development/ns2's future. I'm just kind of ashamed I ever supported UWE beyond my sole purchase of the game (I'm talkin reinforcement donation).
NS2 will continue to be my favorite game for as long as there are other players playing it. But I say that now in spite of its developer instead of because of.
Owners: 467,054 ± 15,671 of subnautica at $20. After valve takes it's cut, that's still in the ballpark of probably ~$6,000,000. I understand that there are bills to pay, people's salaries to be met, expenses. But seriously not a DIME spent on advertising ns2:C on the publisher's end beyond what was probably the absolute minimum they could get away with? That's despicable for a "publisher."
Owners: 22,234 ± 3,421 of NS2:C again, after some very rough and probably bad math... valve takes it's 30%.. then it's split up between dev and pub.. that's still probably in the neighborhood ~$30k - $40k at least (higher if it remained at $15). Not even any of the money made from ns2:c was put back into it for development's sake? for playerbase sake? for not leaving a fking start up that you wanted to give an opportunity high and dry?
Just garbage, UWE. Total, utter garbage.
I've also heard rumor there is no desire to make a NS:3. Wouldn't be surprised after subvomitca. Another shame. Millions of ppl were drawn into ns universe since ns1. It now seems to be being buried alive by it's creator.
TL;DR
UWE never gave FLG a chance, nor the time of day to make NS2:C a success, and for that they should be extremely ashamed. If there is no intention to somehow incorporate combat into ns2 for whatever extremely lazy reasons they have, it should definitely definitely be a priority at this point if they're trying to salvage ns2 and get 'thousands and thousands of people playing ns2.' A LOT of players only played combat, a lot of players enjoyed playing combat for a break from the intensity of ns2. But it was castrated by UWE. Please shape up UWE and restore my faith in you.
The most annoying thing about this all is the Charlie himself neither max or any of the core / original UWE members have even posted on the forums for years for any intent regarding NS2, it has always been Cory or Hugh which is quite discerning because we don't want Hughs PR opinion pieces and cory only steps in when misinformation is posted or when he wants to be a judge, it just isn't fair to all these people who stood by all these years supporting the game.
Actually i'm more surprised that people consider NS2 a failure, it made them a shitload of money since 2012 offical release 10million iirc and that was only in two years, for UWE being an indie company and all at that time it was a crapton of money, i think the biggest mistake was hiring Hugh for anything other then marketing, then again it still wasn't a good marketing campaign, i don't see how anything UWE core team has done being a failure, but ive seen anything hugh and related people who hang around and directly communicate with him turn parts of the game into cancer.
watch this
UWE did give FLG a chance but it was FLG's decision to release it not UWE, they just supported it they technically bought a license to the engine, FLG had people spamming reddit, other gaming websites steam and a bunch of things and it still didn't help them, actually if i remember correctly 90%+ of reviews and comments in relation to FLG's advertising stint lead to people having a negative feedback process, replying with things like "it's the same game on an older version" "you gimped the in-game mod to release this" "i am not paying xyz for a standalone when i already own ns2" I just don't think they gave a shit because they could make some quick $$$ and even then it failed because they gave away more then half of there keys for the game, so in respect to your numbers at the start they gave away 200keys and even then no one wanted to play the game, how does that work?
Hell they could integrate the content back into NS2 and do a release cycle and get there own patreon? too bad it's far too late for that unless NS2 goes free to play too soon.
edit:Did hugh kill everyone in the san francisco office? we've not heard anything from them for years?
I enjoyed Combat when it was implemented in NS2, but it was not that important for me to buy it as a standalone game.
I hope some day there is a way to get it back in the normal game.
It was fun when it first came out. On sure there were some balance issues, but they could've easily been fixed without making the game tedious.
Last time I played it every game consisted of marines turtling until they got exo, then they'd make a push for the alien hive and.once they were away from their base a gorge or two would end it... Literally 9/10 games i saw was an alien win due to bile...
Fighting the turtled marines as alien was tedious and frustrating since they never left their base.. Fighting as turtling marines was boring as hell because all you could do was sit in base and shoot the aliens who came in for kills.. Leaving the marine base was instant death because no other marines would ever push out with you...
To top that off they released 4 patches that not only did nothing to address the balance issues, they tweaked things that made it even more unbalanced... (things that didn't need tweaking)..
I remember with each patch seeing the population drop... If they could've made the game fun I honestly think it would've eventually started gaining popularity (at least with the ns2 crowd)
I saw nothing exciting. Rather, I saw the balance being put upside down (skulks with +220 hp, and fades nerfed to 280). Balance simply werent a priority, rather having the engine/new maps be smooth, as it must be, but ignore the rest, am I right? With only a pair or two of high end competitive players in the PT, the game seemed made for and made by public server gamers. ('skulks feel fragile, lets buff' - 'I can never kill fades, lets nerf!'). There never was competitive aspects, nor strategies, but there was a aspect of fun that one had to tryhard to find. A game centered about combat, without balance - the result should be obvious.
Argueably the design is flawed. Take a truely great game like CS:GO. There there is a constant push on the players to meet other players. The terrorist are pressured through time to plant a bomb - if they dont, they lose. A great mechanic, forcing player interaction, as it is met by another great mechanic of the counter terrorist where they have to stop this to win. And on top of that, oh its great, the pressure is turned around once the bomb is planted. Now the CTs are pressured by time to disarm the bomb, and the terrorist to stop this.
LoL/Dota, your mechanics are minionwaves that pressure towards an enemy nexus, with the road blocked by towers and enemy minions. The farming aspect encourages confrontation, and naturally what has evolved into a laning phase occours. Then there are alot of smaller camps, a boss to give you a huge advantage and depending on it being LoL or Dota a dragon which buffs the killing team or small buffs to pick up.
NS2 win conditions are killing the enemy CC/hive or eliminating all spawns and players on the marine team. To make it not boring, where you wait in locations that are very powerful for yourself, additional techpoints and resnotes are out on the map. Rushes ignore this aspect of the game - an aspect some players take for granted, as they gain you additional scaling and advantages. Therefore players leave these powerful positions to gain scaling and advantages for the later game. Basicly everymap has 10 small bombsites, where you can trade, and gambit back and forth, potentially making ns2 an extreemely complicated game.
NS2:Combat focused on killiing the enemy CC - no other win conditions. No point out on the map like NS2 to push players out on the map to take a risk to gain a reward. They sit on the powerful positions, as there is nothing to push them out of it. You gain scaling by killing enemy units. A mechanic that encourages sitting on your ass, and waiting for stuff to happen to you. Even so, the attack on a chair or hive is extreemely unsatisfying as the enemy spawns in waves in designated locations around their main structure, ending in a death that you cant really do anything about. So even trying to win the game has mechanics that discourage you from doing so, as you are "feeding" the enemy team.
I neither find it a victim of circumstance nor a great game. The potential was there.
Somehow UWE hasn't figured this bit out yet.
Most of us NS2 players now have pregame sandbox which defeats the purpose of combat,
The feeding XP mechanic being in and of itself broken by design and not as fun as the original NS2 strategy elements.
@nizb0ag
What is wrong with people, why when someone is unhappy, the first pathetic lie to be wheeled out is they did it for the money.
Maybe YOU would have done it for the money, but do not put YOUR thoughts and opinions and push them as the actual thoughts and opinions of others.
FLG wanted to make games. FLG left behind modding combat, and began work on a Unity game called Xenoswarm. UWE then approached FLG with the idea of making Combat as a standalone.
They said yes because they were a new game studio, and was an opportunity from which to start making their own games. This wasn't about money, this was about wanting to become game developers. You had people quitting full-time jobs to work on this. It wasn't about the money, although making money is required to keep a business going, and to keep paying the staff so they can eat.
As for how much things were changed. UWE as the publisher decided on the release dates etc. I said from day one, that the game should have at least 18 months to be completed, but they had 9. To basically write a game from scratch. If you own combat, look at the code, the old tech data stuff is gone, and in it's place is an entirely new upgrade system, there was so much work done on it, but they needed much more time than they were given.
And don't get me started on the ungrateful community members who did their best to destroy what little marketing could be afforded or gained by FLG.
Player numbers are obviously an issue, but sometimes, I want to make mods for the sake of it, rather than for people to actually play..
I guess UWE should be glad Natural Selection is still a niche franchise compared to their new success Subnautica, because if it weren't for the unconditional love the remaining community has, you can bet there would've been a bigger backlash. Just look at the H1Z1 controversy over them splitting up their game into two games, despite that game similarly breaking up and having a community backlash ns2 is still reviewed positively in comparison.
Charlie took the thing that really made combat unique and accessible - Buying your own weapons, and made it a part of NS2. For this reason alone, I always said combat was a poisoned chalice.
If you make it exactly like ns:combat, there isn't enough of a difference between Combat and NS2. Players will complain.
If you make the game different from ns:combat, the game won't be 'Combat' anymore. Players will complain.
Combat's only hope was appealing to players who had never heard of NS2. The butt-hurt entitled community who destroyed every piece of media attention FLG got, ensured that community didn't touch it with a barge pole.
I hope every person who wrote a bitter comment on FLG's promotional work has some dream ruined in exactly the same way. You know, karma and all that.
Instead they get two different engine instances, which cannot communicate with each other. And to them it looks like they have to buy the same game twice.
So while we know the whole story as to why this is the way it is, because we're quite invested into the game and the UWE/FLG story. Outsiders who happen to stumble upon NS2 and NS2:Combat either through Steamsales/Youtube videos, Will see two similar gamers and think "hmm that's quite weird...". I mean when is the last time you really cared about the "how or ins and outs" of a developer for a random game you thought was cool on the store?
I won't stand here and bicker if it was or wasn't over money, that was just my opinion based on some citations of memory encapsulation from a whole bunch of sources.
Ignoring people who were going to invest in it, ignoring people who were testing, ignoring criticism and clearly falsely making up shit in there marketing attempts, it wasn't a completely different game it was just a different game-mode with one or two skin changes, maps that were already on the NS2 workshop, models that were on the NS2 workshop, re-created maps from NS1 that sometimes never gave credit to the original makers and or people like Rusty pretending like he was best friends with the people who originally created the maps and took credit for some of them and to top it off that it was clearly pretty much the mod but in a standalone less optimised version of NS2 at the time, they said it was "more optimised" yet it had a far longer loading time and prechaching time, it was buggier then assfuck and was imbalanced more so then the mod they had on NS2, that's not the only thing, adding in custom menus and build menus isn't a hard task, but the backend is, that's the new features?.
>people quitting full-time jobs, yeah nah as far as i am aware FLG consisted of full time working people who worked on it in there spare to sparsley considered time, they even talk about this a few times in there early streams and on there website at some stage, maybe one person was working full-time and that is there own fault..
There's nothing wrong with people who criticize to the point of ridicule, you're trying to sell a game concept that has been done before and much better at that, it was in NS1 as a feature, and in NS2 as a mod, it wasn't our fault as players that they couldn't counter-argue people on steam reviews, reddit and numerous gaming websites, it's faultline games ffs and before you go on a tangent about me being wholey wrong and thinking what i am saying is what people think, go and read the reviews, do you see how delusional some of you people were?
Yeah i know that the code changed quite a bit to accommodate different feature-sets, but what matters is what is ontop, not underneath for the end-user, i even tried porting it all back to NS2 at some stage last year, i got as far as to loading into the game (menus didn't work till i was actually inside the map) was just too broken to do.
I mean i know a few people who have helped and who have modded for NS2 combat but i find it highly unfair to the majority of people who actually bought the game and to the majority of people who tried it out then gave reviews to which they were told to pretty much "not criticize" it seems to be a few people who are somehow related to one or some of the devs/modders who seem to think it's not FLG's fault and try shill hard.
You might have alot of friends but i have my standards and i know the majority of people who had reached a consensus on NS2 combat feel the same way, it's documented on the steam reviews for the game, get salty.
Actually you're right about one thing, it's highly moddable and more so then NS2, the only problem here is that no one is going to bother trying out the mods created for it because there is no playerbase and never was, well there was if you consider random times a bunch of people came over from NS to play it, yeah i saw some of the awsome ns2combat exoskeleton type mods, turret mods that was shared to me too, and at the time i criticized it directly to 4horsemen and never really talked with him since, same goes for a few other people involved.
Actually, if it's not about the money why not just integrate the parts that you can back into NS2 and reap the benefits of actually having people play your creations then having people cry about it on the forums about how nobody plays it? the matter of the fact is that no one wants to play it for varying reasons that has little do with player-base, i remember a few times playing it and the FLG team who were in the servers right at the start were acting all elitist and being general pricks to people, do you think that's okay? especially those people who were streaming it to twitch, i don't see why they wasted there time, they ended up giving away half of there prospective keybase to viewerrs who never actually even played...
Sorry this is a sensitive topic for me because combat shouldn't cost a dime when it was when released practically the same as the mod but with a new weapon and a new interface.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/310110/
It's had some time but you can see the problem here, lots of the people giving bad reviews at the time of release were known in the community, competitive and public servers for NS2, some of those people came from NS1 some didn't it doesn't matter, but what matters is there opinion should matter more, because combat was something they played and it was suddently pay to play combat and people don't like that, not even that people don't like switching applications, FLG should have known that.
most of the good reviews come from people who haven't even heard about natural selection in general they first tried NS2 and then Combat vice-versa, i've checked playtime from good reviews and they don't even play NS2, let alone Combat. So coming to an unbalanced game that was buggy, slow and broken with servers which couldn't handle the game to begin with (i watched massive tickrate drops while in game) it just gives a bad impression of ns2 universe as a whole. The rest are from NS2 combat pts/friends and FLG themselves.
You can practice life forms very easily in combat. That is a huge plus.
You can add fun things to the game people have wanted like devour for onos or lerk lift.
The mod doesn't have to be perfectly balanced, just fun.
Let people have more freedom.
Sell it as part of the appeal of owning ns2.
Hope the people of FLG didnt get too much of a financial and motivational kick in the balls from this whole project.
So that either they make it a free to play introduction to NS2, with market items being shared with NS2, passively growing NS2 community by attracting new players, as well as possibly being a testing ground for new weapons / lifeforms and other balance changes.
Or they make it an official alternate game mode after merging it back with current verion of the engine, basically like before when combat was a mod but better.
Regarding the idea for UWE to bring back combat and add some new life to it... Possibly making two main modes of gameplay of NS2 - clean up the server browser a little. One with NS2 standard and one with combat. Does anyone from the UWE or CDT want to comment if it's possible that may happen in the future? Or is it not worth discussing?
In a perfect world, UWE would nut up, accept responsibility for the failures on their end, buy out combat for a fair price, and reincorporate it into the main game.
I believe that FLG would have been better off doing their own thing than having to be dragged through the mud that has become UWE. The least they could do, as I said, is buy the game back, thereby perhaps giving flg some hope of actually getting themselves off the ground with their own creation, free from uwe's constraints.
Also to ppl saying they think it failed due to its own balance issues, they did what they could to flesh out better balance adjustments. Difficult to get feedback when there's nobody playing the game to give it. Now if UWE did was a publisher is supposed to do and promoted this game outside of the forums, maybe we'd see a different story played out.
Personally I had a few very fun nights playing it. Sincerely believe if ppl outside of ns2 could have gotten familiar with it, they could have been hooked.
On the day combat was released, uwe did not even make a blog post or anything about it on their own website. If I recall there was something about subnaughty. So again, UWE simply set them up for failure in my eyes.