Hi everyone,

As all of you know we released a patch on Thursday night on Steam. With this patch we removed the check for the special edition, so anyone that's pre-ordered the game can now access it.

Now that that's done, I wanted to give everyone an update on what's going on with the technical side of the game.

Releasing beta was a huge milestone for us. Some of you are having fun, others are having problems, but to us this represents the stage at which Natural Selection 2 has become a “game”. We're having fun playtests where we can meaningfully discuss game design and balance. The list of things to do is getting short, and the end (really the beginning!) is in sight.

That said, I'd like to clarify something about the nature of the beta. People may remember the Starcraft 2 or Team Fortress 2 betas and use those to inform their idea of “beta”. Both of those games no doubt were heavily tested internally and for all intents and purposes were finished games. Our beta is neither of those things. Most game companies wouldn't release an actual beta [1] to the public, but we've decided to embrace the fact that we're a small studio with limited resources and we need to get all the feedback we and help we can from our community.

It's definitely disappointing to see that we missed some serious problems with the beta release. I know some of the people in the community are frustrated by these issues, but let me assure you that any issue that's bothering you is bothering me approximately 20,000 times more. When something is bothering me that much, it's going to get addressed. However, we only have 3 programmers, so we have to prioritize.