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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."
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cyo4CgwvLgA&fmt=18 Video of map.
http://www.planetfortress.com/fragopolis/html/2fort5.html General information about map.
http://www.planetfortress.com/engineering101/maps/forts.htmWhere to put sentrys on map.
http://redfort.ytmnd.com/ loool :D
http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=9172 Download.
Actually, the number of engine features and intense shader-reliance make the game very CPU intensive, even compared to other Source games, though IANAGD(game developer). This would make a Nintendo DS port difficult, to say the least.
The graphics themselves aren't so bad; maxed out, I rarely lose any noticeable number of frames without the map design being abhorrent, on a years-old mid-range GPU. The CPU and memory load, on the other hand, is quite large, even with a dual core running at 4ghz and enough RAM to choke anything with less than 64-bits. While I'd honestly be impressed if anyone could manage to get the Source engine ported to a system with specs like the DS, I have my doubts about that happening any time soon, short of a complete butchering of the game, and the release of "Team Fortress 2: Puzzle Pack Extravaganza [Deluxe Edition]". The graphics are simply too complex, despite their retro and simplistic appearance.
Hopefully, though, once handhelds get enough power to become sentient, we'll see quite a few installs of TF2. Since, logically, every sentient being wants to play TF2... or at least Left4Dead.
TF2 used to be balanced. Then they started rolling out updates for classes on at a time. And if you don't have the new unlocks you are at a disadvantage. Even worse they tied to unlocks to lame ass achievements, alot of which require you do stuff that is counter to the whole team concept. Of course that just leads to achievement servers where you don't actually play you just do what you need to to unlock the weapons.