Team Fortress 2 Update To Bring Maps, Sniper and Spy Upgrades

Over the past several days, Valve has been releasing details on an update to Team Fortress 2. They first revealed that the Sniper was taking its turn in a series of class upgrades, getting a bow and arrow that's capable of pinning an enemy to a wall. Next, they showed off a pair of new maps — a sawmill arena map that's in the midst of heavy rainfall and a circular map built around a doomsday weapon. Valve also mentioned a new game mode called Payload Race — it's similar to a regular Payload match, but both teams have a cart to push. The next day brought about an electrified shield for the Sniper, and hinted that the Spy would be getting an update as well. The following announcement confirmed it, introducing a device that would allow the Spy to feign death, and another that lets the Spy remain invisible permanently, only draining their power while in motion.

Comments

This update is fan service.

[YojimboJango]

If you watched the blog yesterday you'd have seen valve doing a lot of fun things for the fans.

Over the course of the day the unlock for a sniper shield got darker and darker, then at around 3pm people on the forums started freaking out because there was a spy behind the sniper in the picture. The pictures were swapped in and out randomly till the actual announcement.

They put a note on the blog saying, "When the Pyro hears about this she'll be inconsolable." There's been a debate over the Pyros gender for a long time on the forums. The post was left up for about an hour before it was stealth edited back to the masculine form. Still there was a lot of people going nuts on the forum over this.

They trolled us pretty hard with a lot of this stuff, but overall it shows that they are paying close enough attention to the community to do so. They knew all the right buttons to press to get people talking and started mashing. I know of no other company that is this dedicated to having fun.

Re:Huzzah.

[VGPowerlord]

On the contrary, the PC version of FPS games have the following advantages:
1. Mouse + Keyboard standard. While you can add them to most consoles these days, the controls must be set up for controllers first and foremost. The mouse is considerably more precise than a controller's analog sticks.
2. Game modifications. Depending on the game, this could be game or server side. Sourcemod is one popular library for Half-Life 2 multiplayer games. Valve's Steam system has even started including popular mods for download.
3. User-created content. Specifically maps. These are other kinds of user-created content, but those usually involve game modifications.
4. Lack of monthly costs. For whatever reason, Microsoft has managed to convince people that paying a monthly fee for their matchmaking service is a good thing.* They actually force you to do it to play online games on the 360... I will never understand how they managed to convince people to buy into this. I don't pay a monthly fee to Valve to use their Steam system...
5. Ease of updates. Big surprise here. When all games are installed to hard drives, they're much easier to update. Particularly games like Team Fortress 2 that are updated a lot.

The examples I used Valve specific; Valve is the current market leader in FPS games for the PC.

* I refuse to pay it; my Xbox Live account is only Silver.