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Natural Selection 2 development is being done by the community

• Egon Kilin
• May 27th, 2014

The ongoing development of Natural Selection 2 will be done by its community, Unknown Worlds recently announced. NS2’s devs said in a blog post that the decision was made in order to allow the company to focus more on their upcoming open-world title, Subnautica. Given that Unknown Worlds is comprised of a small team, their time and resources are limited so they decided that this course of action would be better for both the company and the Natural Selection 2 community.

“Today marks a very important day in Natural Selection 2 History: the day in which the game’s future has the potential to be a whole lot brighter, thanks to its own community. Dating way back to the original NS1, you guys have made selfless efforts to improve and enhance the Natural Selection experience as well as keeping the franchise alive for years after release. We are happy to announce that Unknown Worlds Entertainment has approved a team of experienced and passionate community members to help carry on the development of NS2 into a potential patch 266 (and hopefully, beyond!).”

This “by the community, for the community” approach will hopefully give Natural Selection 2 players exactly what they want from the game. The company is well aware that such a project takes time and there are many obstacles to overcome, but the devs claim that they are planing on being very open about it.  “There is potential for greatness, but we will have many hurdles to overcome along the way,” Unknown Worlds said.

In order to keep things as smooth and efficient as possible, the company has devised a great plan of action. The incentive for contributing to the growth of Natural Selection 2 will be community recognition. Unknown Worlds has created a community recognition project called Squad 5, which is a sort of elite group made up of members who contributed to the project.

“For example, if you have helped out with a notable bug fix, made a nice mod that enhances core gameplay, or created a killer map, you could get a sweet Squad 5 badge in recognition.” This badge will show up on the forums as well as in-game, and let’s other players know that you are one of the people responsible for the development of NS2.

Natural Selection 2 was released back in October 2012 and is currently available for Windows and Linux. The game is a team-oriented multiplayer, which combines FPS and RTS elements. Stay tuned for more news and updates.