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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."
You mean the old "Hunted President" map?
Hell yes, that was great. I haven't played a lot of TF2, but back in the days of old I was a big player of TF (over quakeworld, not over HL, the original TF!). Is the old "Rock" map available too?
I used to love the original QWTF, I thought it was fantastic, perhaps the game I spent more time on than any other, despite having to pay dialup costs per minute back then.
I followed TF ever since it came out, and when TF2 was originally announce as a mod for Quake II I was excited, I was equally excited when it was slated as a massive combat game with commanders and people dropping down out of helicopters as the screenshots showed for Half-Life and then it's own game. After around 5 years I got bored of waiting then something like 9 years on it finally arrived.
Yet, when it arrived, everything new had been dropped and it turned out to be some copy of the original TV, minus some pretty damn important features like grenades and coupled in with some horrible graphical style. Now they talk of some of the classic maps and game modes, perhaps they'll even bring grenades back.
But my point is this, whilst TF2 is great, people obviously want more. It's taken them 9 or 10 years to end up back where they started, mimicking QWTF and even then not quite (again no grenades, lack of old favourite maps). Surely the lesson to be learned by now is that if they want to immitate the success of the original then all they needed to do all along is simply immitate the original albeit with updated graphics (minus the cartoony theme change).
Yes, I very much miss the QWTF days, but it does really seem Valve is only just in recent years beginning to realise what the old QWTF fans said all along- just stay true to the original. They've had a decade to figure this out.