Ending Booby Armour: Creating art, and not just for art’s sake

Gamasutra: Game development updates regularly grace the Unknown Worlds (UWE) blog. It is possible to determine what updates the community finds most interesting by applying fuzzy logic to reactions on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other tools. Naturally, news that receives relatively more 'retweets,' 'shares,' 'likes,' and so on may be considered more engaging.

The most engaging news that UWE has ever posted was the launch of Natural Selection 2 on Halloween 2012. Other big ones include the reveal of new weapons, maps, and features. Giant robots with miniguns attached to each arm tend to incite social media excitement. This is perhaps to be expected, and why what happened on July 4 warrants close examination.

On that Thursday, UWE revealed a new playable Natural Selection 2 character. This character has gameplay attributes identical to existing characters. Her armour style is near identical to an existing character. She runs at the same speed, has the same amount of health, the same sized hit-boxes, the same weapon handling characteristics. Put simply: This character is functionally nothing new. And yet on that day, our fuzzy logic sensors lit up as if we had just re-launched the game.