Natural Selection was one of the first multiplayer, first-person shooters to incorporate a "Commander",[3] whose view of the battlefield was essentially 2-D, from a strictly top-down perspective.

From here, he can purchase upgrades, issue movement orders and drop supplies - all from an overhead perspective, as in many RTS games.

Gorges can choose to build three different "upgrade" chambers: Movement, Defense, and Sensory, each providing three distinct abilities each alien can get.

Each alien can choose how he wants to use his own personal reserve of resource points : building structures (as a gorge), or gestating into higher lifeforms.

Kharaa "Hive Sight" reveals teammates through the walls and structures of the map, this was originally their answer to the commander with his top-down overview of the game.

This is another area where the teams have a key difference - while marines draw on a common pool of resources, each alien accumulates a personal store.

This further increases the requirement for teamwork on the alien side, to achieve the right balance of hives, lifeforms, resource towers and chambers.

[5] In current releases (v3), a typical game lasts 5–15 minutes, but can run over an hour, with both sides vying for control over strategically important Hive Rooms and Resource Nodes.

An admin configurable time limit (default 15 minutes) was introduced in beta 5 which remains in the final version.

According to an interview with the game director, Charlie Cleveland (Flayra), the sequel continues where the original left off and features environments that are dark and denser.

In addition, a major new feature of Natural Selection 2 is dynamic infestation [2], released in December 2006[citation needed].

The proposed feature would dynamically generate bacterial infestation based on what areas of the map the alien team controlled.