 Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital, Intel and SteelSeries. So we're here with Hugh Jeremy who refuses to tell us his job title and insists that they do not have them, but is extremely excited to talk to you guys about the new expansion Natural Selection Reinforced. So, okay, I guess let's start with a really difficult question first and foremost. What have you done about the performance issues? Linus, you asked the right questions first. It's a fact that when Natural Selection 2 launched, the performance wasn't quite where it needed to be, especially on lower end machines. And on higher end machines, people would walk out of a game of Battlefield 3 with tanks exploding and planes flying past and they'd go, why don't I get the same frame rate in Natural Selection 2? Well, in Natural Selection 2 Reinforced we have addressed this. At the low level we've changed the way that Natural Selection 2 uses its scripting language, Lua. In such a way that frame rate is now a lot higher and more consistent. So, only are you running at, say, 60 instead of 40, but you're not dipping down to 30 all the time, like used to happen. And guys, there are some great articles on PC Perspective about the whole frame latency or frame rating or frame timing issue. And it really does affect the gaming experience in a way that the sheer time it takes to draw each individual frame does not. So, with that said, you guys, okay, so it runs smoothly on Windows, but you told me there was some other cool stuff. Come on, come on. Very cool stuff. If you open up the options menu in Natural Selection 2 now on Windows, you might notice an option to change between D3D11, D3D9 and OpenGL. And that's a hint. Why would we be running OpenGL? The reason is that Linux uses OpenGL to draw graphics in 3D games. Natural Selection 2 Reinforced runs on Linux. You can go to the Steam Linux store and buy Natural Selection 2. And if you already own it on Windows, it'll run on Linux right now as well. You don't need to buy a separate key. That's fantastic. Now I'm going to confess that I had a co-worker. His name's Ivan. He's Russian. He's an avid gamer, hardcore guy. And he was telling me about Natural Selection, telling me it was the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel. And he spent about ten minutes explaining the gameplay mechanic to me, and I kind of, by the end of it, I had kind of glazed over, and I was like, Whaaaaaaaaa. It didn't feel that accessible to someone who doesn't know how the game works 100% already. What have you done? What have we done? We released a game that does have a lot of depth to it. The rewarding experiences that people have in Natural Selection 2, being led by a commander, leading as the commander, having complex real time strategy battles, cloaked in a first person shooter shell, they come with time, they come with learning. And when we initially released the game, the learning was too hard. There was no scripted single player tutorial. There were a bunch of tutorial videos, we admit it, they weren't good enough. The reviewers said so. In Natural Selection 2 Reinforced, there is now a full single player tutorial. You can play through it, it is scripted, it will introduce you to the basic game mechanics for both a marine and an alien. And the commander now has a contextual help system during play that will hint you what upgrades are needed, where you should place buildings, etc. to ease you into the process. Because as you say, it's a deep game, there's a lot going on. When you take a real time strategy game, which is what Natural Selection 2 is, and you replace all those units on the ground with real people, you get a little bit of complexity but it's that complexity that breeds rewarding gameplay. And now that we have these tutorial systems, we hope that gameplay is more accessible. Now we've managed to get this far without actually talking about any of the gameplay improvements that have been made in Reinforced. I mean it's great for the techie audience that we happen to have, but if you had to want them to buy the game, what would you tell them they're going to get with Reinforced? Well, they're firstly going to get everything that was in Natural Selection 2. It's a free update, so anyone that owns NS2 gets Reinforced for free. And if you buy NS2 now, you get Reinforced. And Gorgeous, which is our previous expansion. Some of the headline features that have gone into Reinforced include Biodome, which you might be able to see behind us right now. Completely new art set, and that's important because all our previous maps used variations of the refinery art set. Biodome is a completely new look for Natural Selection 2. Female Marines are now in, you can select your sex in the menu, and that includes all the custom armours, the three different types of armours. We've added the Reinforcement Program, which allows you to play as a black skulk with red spines and various other armour types as well in there to voluntarily support development of Natural Selection 2. We have added the tutorial system, we've added Linux support, we've added cluster grenades, nerve gas grenades, pulse grenades. The Onos can now use Bone Shield, which has been an ability that's been requested for so long, there's been graphical improvements, we can now render glass a lot better, which is essential for Biodome because there's so many glassy areas. I'm going to run out of breath right now. There's a huge changelog on unknownworlds.com slash NS2. Now I lost track when you said that I could choose sex. So the options are yes, no and... The options are definitely male and female. Is there a dog? Everyone's adding female soldiers and dogs. You've got to keep up, I'm going to keep doing this too. Well firstly, we'll definitely admit that the addition of the female Marine was not held up for technical reasons, there's nothing in the spark engine that stops you adding female Marines at launch. What stopped us was budget and time. So now that we've got that, we've managed to put her in and that's very important to us. With dogs, we do have a dog but it's not a new feature, it's been in there from the start. The Skulk has four legs except instead of paws it's got spikes that allow it to stick to walls and ceilings. The only time it makes a barking noise is when it bites someone in the face. Fact, the sound designer of a Natural Section 2, Simon Kamikaze, he's a genius and when he was recording the sound for the Skulk biting, he was literally sitting under a doona with a microphone going, that is a fact. That's awesome, so thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us. Guys, this is Hugh and don't forget our trip to the show is powered by Western Digital, Intel and Steel series. Don't miss any of our coverage of PAX Prime 2013. Thanks so much man. Thank you Linus.