Cheer up, Gorge. We still love you even if your nose is big. The NS devs have continued their media blitz in the leadup to PAX with three dev blog updates in the past week. Cast your eyes upon this ordered list:
Hopefully it what this is all leading up to is some actual gameplay footage at PAX. Maybe we’ll even get our hands on the alpha soon. Maybe Barack Obama will descend from the skies on a surfboard and personally deliver it to AusNS2 HQ. Stay tuned. But not really because that won’t actually happen.
Megalist updates! As always the full megalist is available here.
- Infantry Portal
- Blog post describing the technology (tl;dr nanites)
- Gorge reveal!
- Spit As in NS1, the Gorge can spit a projectile that does damage to marines and structures. It makes a sizzling sound on enemies and glows, doing damage over time. It also obscures marine players’ screens a bit and slows marine movement for a short time. It shows up as a bumpy infestation on its target. Spit alt-fire is a shorter-range, slower speed, more potent version especially suited for structures.
- Health Spray We’re keeping the healing spray from NS1 as well. This creates a cloud of healing bacteria that will heal all friendly players and structures within it. Using this he’ll be able to keep his teammates and precious structures alive and healthy. The area effect also means he won’t have to move his corpulence unnecessarily.
- Damage Soak One new ability we’re giving the Gorge is a armored protection ability (name pending). By holding crouch, he can drop his cushy paunch to the ground, extend the armor plates on his back. Doing so will mean that he takes damage off his energy instead of health, as long as he can do so! Energy is like the equivalent of alien ammo, but it never runs out and is always replenishing itself. So if he goes immobile, he can soak quite a bit of damage without getting hurt. At some point though, he’ll run out of energy and he’ll need to be saved by other players or will need to get up and shuffle away. You can see this ability at 0:32 in the Gorge video.
- Chambers Chambers and how they relate to alien upgrades represent the weightiest change for the Gorge in NS2. Now there is an Alien Commander building technology structures, so Gorge-created structures won’t unlock upgrades or abilities for other players. The unctuous chambers that the Gorge spits up will be purely tactical. These include the familiar Defense Chamber(automatically heals players or structures nearby) and the Offense Chamber (a kind of organic turret that shoots spikes, possibly renamed to Spike Plant). His overabundance…of abilities mean we’ll probably limit his structures to these two.
- One last ability we’re considering is one suggested by the community – by holding shift he could Belly Slide along slick or downhill surfaces. Maybe as a quick escape down a ramp or just for fun
- Mod code will autodownload and will not mess with your install, so it should be seamless to switch between vanilla and modded servers.
