I'll tell you, its a bit of a mixed bag. I had previously been working off of WON (via All Seeing Eye), so this was also my first exposure to Steam.
I'm not finding much as far as pro goes for this version. The concept of the Combat mode is quite nice and the maps they've made for it look quite good as well. However, the mode is pretty well broken because they didn't modify any of the NS values.
To understand why this is bad, ask yourself how 2.0 matches often ended. It was usually an HA train, right? Well, to defeat that, the whole team would band together and beat them barely. Well, in Combat, you have an HA train every 30 seconds a few minutes into the game. They never have to repurchase it, so every HA you kill comes back in the standard respawn interval. You don't have any chambers or Gorges, so your hive only heals itself slowly. The marines can heal their buildings with welders quite easily. Most matches work out to the marines camping their chair and shooting aliens as they approach. Aliens don't get projectile weapons until Fades and Third hive weapons or Lerks with gas, so it's often a turkey shoot.
For Classic NS, it isn't all that different. Obvious changes are the new vulnerability of the Onos and Fade to damage because of their fixed hitboxes. Despite a generous increase in health, they all seem to die quite fast now. The Lerk has lost spikes in favor of bite...which I still don't understand the logic of. It is now a Skulk with a bit more Z axis control, and is woefully unable to contend with Shotguns or HMGs. Other than that it feels almost exactly like 2.0. The elec TF and node reach a bit further, the hand grenade is fun for a lark, but otherwise I didn't find much to adjust to.
From a steam standpoint, I suppose it's mixed. I had been using ASE, so I never had to contend with the very inefficient internal browser. From that standpoint Steam is an improvement because I don't have to use a third party browser anymore. However, the time it takes to saying, 'I'd like to play some NS' to actually playing NS has increased by some substantial time. You have to load Steam, then boot NS, then it does some precaching, then you play. That can get a bit aggravating considering its the same old five year old Half Life. I've had some lag from time to time, but not telling if its the server or what. Overall, Steam doesn't really improve my play enjoyment only increases the time to get into the game. If I didn't use ASE, I'm sure my tune would change.
I'm also a bit disappointed in their testing of NS 3.0. The revived Nancy map is totally broken, the menu options are often grayed out and don't display the costs for evolving. I also had some challenges actually selecting things too.
I wish they had taken a more extensive playtesting period before releasing. It feels quite imbalanced and the Nancy problem is just inexcuseable considering it was a map everyone liked so much in the past.
