tbone4690
06-19-2007, 03:34 AM
Team Fortress 2
by Chris Remo Jun 18, 2007 10:30am CST
Team Fortress 2 really has been in development for going on ten years, or so I was told by Valve's Robin Walker and Charlie Brown during a recent trip to the company's Bellevue, Seattle offices. Production of the long awaited game, for years presumed by many to be vaporware, never completely stopped or restarted, despite the drastic changes it has seen to its gameplay and visual style.
"It's a testament to our internal perspective that we're just not going to ship something until it's ready," Walker said. "As a company, we hate being in a position where we're making guesses."
As is characteristic of Valve's development process, each element of Team Fortress 2 underwent iteration after iteration after iteration. It is a philosophy that always seems to work out for the best in terms of the final product, but can lead to agonizing delays for fans.
Longtime followers will remember Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms, the much more realistically-rendered Team Fortress followup revealed around the turn of the century. It featured a strategy-driven Commander class, numerous highly-hyped graphical technologies, weapons modeled after military hardware, tanks and helicopters, and grim-faced army guys.
"It's a testament to our internal perspective that we're just not going to ship something until it's ready. As a company, we hate being in a position where we're making guesses."So what happened to that, anyway?
"It wasn't fun," admitted Walker, who was part of the original Team Fortress team hired by Valve to develop the sequel in 1998. He went on to clarify that there was never a point at which Valve simply ditched one design and went off full bore in the opposite direction. Rather, as always, it was constant iteration and testing that led to the eventual refinements or removal of various mechanics, until the team ended up with a game that, at its core, is much more reminiscent of the original Team Fortress and Team Fortress Classic. Remarkably, as Walker recalls, nearly every developer who worked on Team Fortress Classic remains on the Team Fortress 2 team--only three or so have moved on.
Class warfare
The crux of Valve's design goals for Team Fortress 2 has been to make the classes as unique and complete as possible. This has required some heavy modifications to the original game's balance, but is that enough to satiate those who claim that TF2 is simply a repackaged Team Fortress? Walker's response is that TFC had the right idea, but it didn't quite pull it off to the ideal level; TF2 should remedy that. "In TFC, the classes weren't sufficiently different," he said. "A focus in TF2 has been to push those classes farther and farther apart."
Essentially, players should feel that choosing a class is a significant decision, one with implications throughout gameplay. This has led to changes such as the hotly debated removal of grenades, which in turn led to the de facto nonexistence of the infamous concussion grenade jump trick ("conc jumping"). The developers aren't out to destroy extreme mobility or explosives, however--they're just trying to make them more associated with particular classes. The demoman is now the only class with an indirect fire projectile, and the Scout has a gloriously unrealistic double-jump ability. As if in a 3D platformer, the Scout can even change his direction of momentum on the second jump, making for some impressive mid-air juking abilities as well as the potential for quick vertical shortcuts.
By giving the classes extremely distinct identities, Valve is attempting to create numerous strengths and weaknesses between the classes depending on the combat situation. Walker and Brown frequently referred to the Scout when describing the ins and outs of class balance, as they feel that the Scout was one of the original classes most in need of an overhaul. For example, the Pyro's shotgun and massively powerful flamethrower are short-ranged weapons, but he moves faster than most classes, allowing him to get face to face with his enemies relatively easily. Unlike most classes, however, the Scout outpaces the Pyro, meaning in wide open areas he can dance around the Pyro, control the terms of the fight, and manage to evade the flames if controlled by a skilled player. In a confined space, on the other hand, he is unlikely to be able to avoid the Pyro's damage spread.
The Scout can fairly easily avoid indirect fire from the sticky bomb launcher or grenade launcher of a Demoman--who is better suited to defensive roles or precautionary explosive-laying--or more deliberately fired heavy weapons such as the Soldier's rocket launcher, but that isn't to say he is simply an all-purpose heavy class hunter. The Heavy himself, armed with a massive rapid-fire minigun, makes short work of Scouts as they approach; after all, it is easier to dodge a grenade than a spate of bullets. A similar situation holds for the Sniper, who can take careful aim at a Scout from long range without fear of the Scout being able to return fire.
Of course, if the Scout can come at the slow-moving Heavy from another angle, he might be able to dance around (or over) the oaf while repeatedly beating the big guy with his melee weapon, an aluminum baseball bat. And while that big, lumbering Heavy would make an easy target for a Sniper, the Sniper better make sure to take him out quickly, because, unlike the Scout, the Heavy is capable of responding with a hail of fire. Snipers are rewarded for holding a position and waiting for the ideal shot. When its scope is zoomed in, a sniper rifle continuously charges up in power until fired; when unzoomed, that charge will tick down until zoomed again. The Sniper is still mobile while zoomed, but moves more slowly and is restricted by low peripheral vision due to the visually restrictive scope sight.
The stealthy Spy draws on his original design and expands on it. He is capable of disguising himself in the enemy's liveries, or even activating a cloaking device that renders him invisible, at least until he fires a weapon or is fired upon. Laughing, Walker mentioned that, in testing, Valve has found that some of the most effective Spy players are those who are not necessarily the most experienced Team Fortress or Team Fortress 2 players--experienced non-Spy players will be on the lookout for disguised Spies trying to inconspicuously achieve certain goals, but those who are playing it more by ear frequently fail to even register with those who are looking for the patterns.
Then, there are the Engineer and the Medic--the support classes.
Playing a Medic is an experience unlike any other. Walker, Brown, and co. might take umbrage at such a statement--after all, the whole point of TF2 is that one should be able to say that about any of its classes. While that is true, it is just a little more true for the Medic. "We wanted to move the focus from ten guys working together to two guys working together," explained Walker--that is, there should still be an overall sense of teamplay, but playes will also be putting much more of a focus on buddying up into smaller units. At the center of this is the Medic, equipped with a retro-futuristic health beam gun (an an amusing syringe launcher). A medics is in his element when latched onto another class, keeping his health beam continuously firing and keeping his partner healthy. This is particularly effective with a Heavy, who is big and slow-moving enough that he needs the protection, and will not outpace the Medic.
While beaming health, the Medic is slowly building up progress on a secondary meter. Upon filling that meter, the Medic can unleash ten seconds of invulnerability for himself and his partner. It is easy to imagine how devastating--and wonderfully enjoyable--this is when applied to a Heavy during a base assault.
To get his charge up, the Medic wants to be constantly healing. This means that, while there is a definite skill involved in being a good Medic who can stick to his buddy, switch to healing others when necessary, and unleash his charge at the appropriate time, there is also a level of skill involved in being a good partner to a Medic. While effective at keeping others alive, the Medic is not particularly well-equipped to keep himself alive while under fire, so it is crucial for his partner to position himself in such a way that the Medic can remain behind cover or out of the enemy's line of sight, while still being in a position that allows the Medic to retain line of sight to his buddy with his heal gun.
The Engineer, with his array of defensive and support structures, contributes to the team's success in the most indirect way, but in a way that leaves a lot of room for tactical consideration and potential firepower. Armed with a shotgun, pistol, and heavy wrench, he can take care of himself in combat to a reasonable degree, but his strength is building sentry turrets, health and ammunition dispensers, and teleporters. The usefulness of these devices speaks for itself. The Engineer has a unique ability among the classes to gather not just ammunition but also scrap metal, which he can use to upgrade his turrets up to a potential third stage; when upgraded, they impossibly transform into larger and more imposing devices, robotically expanding themselves out of nowhere in the style of Command & Conquer buildings.
Amusingly, the building and upgrading of turrets is achieved by bashing them with the wrench. Additional Engineers can join in to speed the process along. On one occasion, while building a defensive sentry in a crucial choke point, I had two other Engineer teammates run over and begin lending their wrenches to the process. The sight of three Engineers hunched over a self-constructing turret, all bashing the hell out of it with wrenches, is a brilliant moment.
Continued in next post...
by Chris Remo Jun 18, 2007 10:30am CST
Team Fortress 2 really has been in development for going on ten years, or so I was told by Valve's Robin Walker and Charlie Brown during a recent trip to the company's Bellevue, Seattle offices. Production of the long awaited game, for years presumed by many to be vaporware, never completely stopped or restarted, despite the drastic changes it has seen to its gameplay and visual style.
"It's a testament to our internal perspective that we're just not going to ship something until it's ready," Walker said. "As a company, we hate being in a position where we're making guesses."
As is characteristic of Valve's development process, each element of Team Fortress 2 underwent iteration after iteration after iteration. It is a philosophy that always seems to work out for the best in terms of the final product, but can lead to agonizing delays for fans.
Longtime followers will remember Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms, the much more realistically-rendered Team Fortress followup revealed around the turn of the century. It featured a strategy-driven Commander class, numerous highly-hyped graphical technologies, weapons modeled after military hardware, tanks and helicopters, and grim-faced army guys.
"It's a testament to our internal perspective that we're just not going to ship something until it's ready. As a company, we hate being in a position where we're making guesses."So what happened to that, anyway?
"It wasn't fun," admitted Walker, who was part of the original Team Fortress team hired by Valve to develop the sequel in 1998. He went on to clarify that there was never a point at which Valve simply ditched one design and went off full bore in the opposite direction. Rather, as always, it was constant iteration and testing that led to the eventual refinements or removal of various mechanics, until the team ended up with a game that, at its core, is much more reminiscent of the original Team Fortress and Team Fortress Classic. Remarkably, as Walker recalls, nearly every developer who worked on Team Fortress Classic remains on the Team Fortress 2 team--only three or so have moved on.
Class warfare
The crux of Valve's design goals for Team Fortress 2 has been to make the classes as unique and complete as possible. This has required some heavy modifications to the original game's balance, but is that enough to satiate those who claim that TF2 is simply a repackaged Team Fortress? Walker's response is that TFC had the right idea, but it didn't quite pull it off to the ideal level; TF2 should remedy that. "In TFC, the classes weren't sufficiently different," he said. "A focus in TF2 has been to push those classes farther and farther apart."
Essentially, players should feel that choosing a class is a significant decision, one with implications throughout gameplay. This has led to changes such as the hotly debated removal of grenades, which in turn led to the de facto nonexistence of the infamous concussion grenade jump trick ("conc jumping"). The developers aren't out to destroy extreme mobility or explosives, however--they're just trying to make them more associated with particular classes. The demoman is now the only class with an indirect fire projectile, and the Scout has a gloriously unrealistic double-jump ability. As if in a 3D platformer, the Scout can even change his direction of momentum on the second jump, making for some impressive mid-air juking abilities as well as the potential for quick vertical shortcuts.
By giving the classes extremely distinct identities, Valve is attempting to create numerous strengths and weaknesses between the classes depending on the combat situation. Walker and Brown frequently referred to the Scout when describing the ins and outs of class balance, as they feel that the Scout was one of the original classes most in need of an overhaul. For example, the Pyro's shotgun and massively powerful flamethrower are short-ranged weapons, but he moves faster than most classes, allowing him to get face to face with his enemies relatively easily. Unlike most classes, however, the Scout outpaces the Pyro, meaning in wide open areas he can dance around the Pyro, control the terms of the fight, and manage to evade the flames if controlled by a skilled player. In a confined space, on the other hand, he is unlikely to be able to avoid the Pyro's damage spread.
The Scout can fairly easily avoid indirect fire from the sticky bomb launcher or grenade launcher of a Demoman--who is better suited to defensive roles or precautionary explosive-laying--or more deliberately fired heavy weapons such as the Soldier's rocket launcher, but that isn't to say he is simply an all-purpose heavy class hunter. The Heavy himself, armed with a massive rapid-fire minigun, makes short work of Scouts as they approach; after all, it is easier to dodge a grenade than a spate of bullets. A similar situation holds for the Sniper, who can take careful aim at a Scout from long range without fear of the Scout being able to return fire.
Of course, if the Scout can come at the slow-moving Heavy from another angle, he might be able to dance around (or over) the oaf while repeatedly beating the big guy with his melee weapon, an aluminum baseball bat. And while that big, lumbering Heavy would make an easy target for a Sniper, the Sniper better make sure to take him out quickly, because, unlike the Scout, the Heavy is capable of responding with a hail of fire. Snipers are rewarded for holding a position and waiting for the ideal shot. When its scope is zoomed in, a sniper rifle continuously charges up in power until fired; when unzoomed, that charge will tick down until zoomed again. The Sniper is still mobile while zoomed, but moves more slowly and is restricted by low peripheral vision due to the visually restrictive scope sight.
The stealthy Spy draws on his original design and expands on it. He is capable of disguising himself in the enemy's liveries, or even activating a cloaking device that renders him invisible, at least until he fires a weapon or is fired upon. Laughing, Walker mentioned that, in testing, Valve has found that some of the most effective Spy players are those who are not necessarily the most experienced Team Fortress or Team Fortress 2 players--experienced non-Spy players will be on the lookout for disguised Spies trying to inconspicuously achieve certain goals, but those who are playing it more by ear frequently fail to even register with those who are looking for the patterns.
Then, there are the Engineer and the Medic--the support classes.
Playing a Medic is an experience unlike any other. Walker, Brown, and co. might take umbrage at such a statement--after all, the whole point of TF2 is that one should be able to say that about any of its classes. While that is true, it is just a little more true for the Medic. "We wanted to move the focus from ten guys working together to two guys working together," explained Walker--that is, there should still be an overall sense of teamplay, but playes will also be putting much more of a focus on buddying up into smaller units. At the center of this is the Medic, equipped with a retro-futuristic health beam gun (an an amusing syringe launcher). A medics is in his element when latched onto another class, keeping his health beam continuously firing and keeping his partner healthy. This is particularly effective with a Heavy, who is big and slow-moving enough that he needs the protection, and will not outpace the Medic.
While beaming health, the Medic is slowly building up progress on a secondary meter. Upon filling that meter, the Medic can unleash ten seconds of invulnerability for himself and his partner. It is easy to imagine how devastating--and wonderfully enjoyable--this is when applied to a Heavy during a base assault.
To get his charge up, the Medic wants to be constantly healing. This means that, while there is a definite skill involved in being a good Medic who can stick to his buddy, switch to healing others when necessary, and unleash his charge at the appropriate time, there is also a level of skill involved in being a good partner to a Medic. While effective at keeping others alive, the Medic is not particularly well-equipped to keep himself alive while under fire, so it is crucial for his partner to position himself in such a way that the Medic can remain behind cover or out of the enemy's line of sight, while still being in a position that allows the Medic to retain line of sight to his buddy with his heal gun.
The Engineer, with his array of defensive and support structures, contributes to the team's success in the most indirect way, but in a way that leaves a lot of room for tactical consideration and potential firepower. Armed with a shotgun, pistol, and heavy wrench, he can take care of himself in combat to a reasonable degree, but his strength is building sentry turrets, health and ammunition dispensers, and teleporters. The usefulness of these devices speaks for itself. The Engineer has a unique ability among the classes to gather not just ammunition but also scrap metal, which he can use to upgrade his turrets up to a potential third stage; when upgraded, they impossibly transform into larger and more imposing devices, robotically expanding themselves out of nowhere in the style of Command & Conquer buildings.
Amusingly, the building and upgrading of turrets is achieved by bashing them with the wrench. Additional Engineers can join in to speed the process along. On one occasion, while building a defensive sentry in a crucial choke point, I had two other Engineer teammates run over and begin lending their wrenches to the process. The sight of three Engineers hunched over a self-constructing turret, all bashing the hell out of it with wrenches, is a brilliant moment.
Continued in next post...