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Valve Discusses Team Fortress 2's Future
The Escapist chatted with Valve's Robin Walker about how the Team Fortress 2 team has been listening to feedback and continually updating the game to fix problems and add to the gameplay experience. Walker mentions that ideas for new classes are "floating around," and that a new mode of play will be introduced soon.
"'Players have driven our entire approach to designing achievements, the way we tie unlockables to those achievements and the design of those new weapons themselves. The choices we made within the Medic and Heavy updates were very much the result of the ways that players have used that combination of classes within the game. The addition of the payload game mode came from players requesting an old Team Fortress Classic map called Hunted, and describing what they did and didn't like in that map.' ... The Scout is the next class slated for the special treatment, and Walker expects the update will be available early this year. Additionally, the team is juggling a number of side projects at the moment, including finally bringing a year's worth of the downloadable content and upgrades to the Xbox 360 version of the game. A new Payload map is in the works, more community maps are on the way and the team will soon unveil a very different new game mode."
... would be a step in the right direction.
Those guys at Valve aren't stupid. (Hell, I've gotta hand it to them, they're some of the best developers around. They are to this generation what Blizzard was to the last.) When they realized that the honeymoon was over between gamers and Team Fortress 2, they poured all of their effort and energy into Left 4 Dead. Why'd they do that?
- As a competitive FPS, Team Fortress 2's gameplay doesn't add up. The balance is god awful. Did the Pyro really need a back-stab when the flamethrower was already practically OHKO? How many of the guns don't shoot sideways, anyway? Why yes, you should need half of your team or an ubercharge to handle one sentry turret. The only reason to play Soldier is if you have enough cover to spam your rockets, since they move slower than some of the classes run and only do respectable damage when you score a critical hit. (Meaning that the class is only good with saturation fire, which the Demoman can do much, much better. Let's not forget their pathetic conc-jump, which the Demoman is also better at.) There are too many issues with the gameplay to list, but you know one thing that does even the odds? All-crit servers.
- Related to the above, there's a reason Team Fortress 2 also goes by 'Counter Strike Casual'. Very few of the weapons are reliable, meaning that whether or not you take out an opponent (even at point blank range in the case of the Scout) is left to chance. That leaves team formation and movement at the fore which, while an admirable design choice, is not mutually exclusive to making the game more skill-oriented than this. If it weren't for ammo, you would literally get the same gameplay experience out of having everyone hold the left mouse button and 'w' and then move toward the enemy with the best formation winning. Even as a beginner's game that's shallow.
- Nobody likes making maps for Source. This is as true in Team Fortress 2 as it is for every other game since Half Life 2. A victim of its own success, games made for the Source engine raised the bar for quality in graphics, maps, and levels, but failed to make reproducing that any easier. It's very unusual for me to find custom maps in circulation on any server for any Source game, and Team Fortress 2 is no different. The maps it came with get very old very fast.
Since they already kind of fucked up with the game and people aren't going to buy it twice, why support it? Unfortunately, this 'throw it to the dogs' mentality only works with games that are actually easy and worthwhile to modify. Valve's art project had potential that was largely left unfulfilled, and now the game has extremely little good content and a lot of long standing problems that... Well, look at it this way. Ten years ago, the Half-Life mod community could've fixed this in a week. Not so now. If you as a company can't see your product getting more sales by you supporting it, the only reason you should support it is as a courtesy, and the revenue stream comes before courtesy. (Otherwise, courtesy is something you can't afford.)
I love that console users *expect* updates now. Even last-gen consoles never got updates.
That would have been pretty amazing if they did. Hard drives and broadband were only standard on the XBOX. Current gen consoles could and do handle it just fine. TF2 has been updated a few times, but that seems to have been just to prevent cheating. Halo has had substantial updates.
Buying for the console is silly anyway. You pay $10-$20 more than you do for the PC version so that you can play the game using a terrible controller.
How is the used PC-game market treating you? And you have to love that DRM. Also the games that don't get to PCs. And then there's the computer maintenece and updates, which we all know are more fun than actually playing games as soon as you turn on the console. You pay hundreds of dollars every so often just to play a smaller selection of games!
Disclaimer: I do PC game, but you have to realize that PC gaming is not perfect either.
Dear cornflake,
I have an 8 year old PC that serves my computing needs but can't run TF2 and can't be updated to that point. Spending thousands of dollars on a gaming rig for one game (two maybe, I would probably play the updated HL1) is a decision so stupid even I wouldn't do it. I also don't even have enough free time to where I should be posting this, so I do not have enough time to set up said computer.
Therefore, please send me a gaming computer set up and ready to play TF2 and I will indeed play it as it was "meant" to be played. Until then, try not to assume what works for you will work for everyone.