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Ryuujining:
An even longer teaser trailer.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMgTUWfP10k
lawl & rocket jumps
Oh yeah, here's the first trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaF638MBSAE Ryuujin fucked around with this message on 05-16-2007 at 03:22 AM.
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The first surprise, playing Team Fortress 2, is how incredibly bloody it is. It's fantastically good fun, too, but you can pretty much see that just from looking at it. The explosive gore, bony hunks of shredded men and severed heads are more of a shock among these beaming cartoon smiles, but you soon realise they're entirely necessary.In TF2, things do what they look like they should do. A direct hit from a smoke-belching rocket looks like it ought to rip someone apart, so it does. But equally, a cartoon-style soldier who jumps over an explosion ought to be sent flying rather than simply receiving third degree burns, collapsing and being rushed to hospital.
Previous incarnations of the team-based shooter - including three TF2s that were never released - looked too serious. That clashed with the lunatic physics of rocket-jumping and a lot of the fun ideas Valve wanted to add. "We had it backwards," says project lead Robin Walker. "We should be building stuff that's fun, and the art should be making it more fun."
Another developer, faced with this problem, might have thought "Our weapons aren't very realistic. Let's make them more realistic." Valve thought "Our weapons aren't very realistic. Let's make a cartoon game." The sheer force of that change is awesome to behold.
The stylised look has enabled them to exaggerate the physical features of the nine classes, so that you can tell who you're facing from as far away as you can see them. But the bigger change is that they've exaggerated the classes themselves. They're spectacularly better at what they're obviously meant to do, and rubbish at everything else.
Take the Spy. He's always been able to disguise himself as any enemy and moonwalk casually into their base. But now he can cloak too, vanishing entirely for that whole awkward, highly suspicious infiltration period. Once he's in, he doesn't have the nailgun, shotgun, gas grenades and tranquilliser darts of old. A flick-knife and a small-calibre pistol are all he needs to ply his dark trade.
It's now so easy to slip behind enemy lines that playing a Spy becomes not about whether you can get a kill, but who needs killing most. The lone ranger has become a team player: everyone relies on him to take out the most dangerous player in heavy enemy fortifications. And when he strikes - with a sudden reveal and a sharp flick of his blade - he can usually vanish again before he's julienned by enemy fire. Only to find another dark corner and reappear as someone else. It's subterfuge taken to the logical extreme; what doesn't serve it has been scrapped.
The Spy's bound to be an early favourite - apart from anything he just looks so goddamn suave - but I actually had much more fun as the Medic. Their healing ray was one of the main reasons Valve had to scrap the realistic art style: they prototyped this insane device, and it was just too much fun to leave out. It locks onto a friendly and pumps them full of health points, beyond their normal maximum, charging up all the while. By the time you've buffed most of your team, you'll be at full charge and ready to go 'invuln'. This makes you and the guy you're healing impervious to all damage for around ten seconds, sending both of you on a bloodthirsty rampage into enemy territory.
By this point you've already formed a close relationship with your preferred healee: they've been able to tank absurd amounts of damage while you stood behind them pumping them with plus-signs, and they've fearlessly put their body between you and danger. But now you're true brothers in arms: after all your careful co-operation and strategic retreats, the two of you are suddenly the most devastating thing on the battlefield. When the magic finally expires, many kills later, you dash to a safe spot, pant, and heal up for another go. It's another great example of that functional exaggeration: you're so good at healing, as a Medic, that it's virtually all you do.
Engineers work best in partnerships, too, but with each other. They now build sentry guns, healing stations and teleporter pads much faster if they work together. It's common to see a gaggle of them crowded round some gadget, all pounding it with their spanners (the charmingly unscientific building process), and when they step back your team has a full-blown frontline base. The build-order requires strategy: turrets are the most useful to your team, but building dispensers first means you can build everything else more quickly, while teleporters bring other players to your makeshift base to protect you and push forward.
One class that does still work alone is the Scout. The poor, maligned, woefully underpowered Scout - or so he was. His rebirth is triumphant: he's not just fast-running, he's fast-jumping, fast-firing and almost impossible to stop. He's perfect for a seasoned Unreal Tournament player, and not just because he can now double-jump. His main weapon is the Scattergun, a unique shotgun whose broad spread and impressive damage makes it feel a lot like UT's Flak Cannon. It's not really a question of whether you can pick off a Scout before he bounds past you: it's a question of whether you can pick him off before he unloads a handcannon into your eyes.
TF2 only comes with six maps, but Valve are trying an intriguing game mode on one of them, Hydro, to ensure it stays fresh. Territorial Control gives each team a home base, and two of the four control points in the no-man's land between. The game itself then decides which two control points are 'in play', and blocks the routes to the rest of the map.
Once one team takes the enemy's point, the game chooses again, trying to avoid having the fight play out over the same routes and areas. It's a bit complicated, so I videoed Robin explaining it with visual aids and uploaded it here: snipurl.com/1gv46.
But it's still the classes that excite us most. That selection menu is like a box of chocolates - you'll eventually have a firm favourite (mine's the Scout, I'm great with him), but each one has something uniquely delicious about it.
They're so different that at times it's like you're all playing different games: the Engineer's doing his RTS thing over there, the Scout's playing a bunny-hopping deathmatch game behind, the Spy's coming over all Hitman, and those two Pyros circling each other with their curling tongues of flame down there - well, I'm not entirely sure what they're playing. They might actually be dancing.
And the 'only 6 maps' thing explained further :
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quote:Team Fortress 2's dynamic levels explained
"We could make two-hundred maps and people would play five of them, over and over," project lead Robin Walker told us when we visited Valve recently. "So what do we get if instead of producing a load of maps, we produce one map that's different every time?" Well, it's complicated, so we'll let him explain it - watch the video.
We're leaving Robin to explain this because we wanted to spend our full preview talking about what the game's actually like to play. That's in this month's PC Gamer, and will appear here on our CVG subsite later in the month.
As for how the dynamic maps work in practice, that was hard to judge. The match we played on Hydro, the first map to use this special game mode, was enormous fun. But as extensive as our playtest was, they didn't let us play on the map for three years, and that's the kind of heavy use under which this system should flourish.
What we did notice is that this is not just a Battlefield type system with some control points 'locked'. When a point is not in play, routes to that section of the map are physically blocked off, so the physical shape of the map is different for every combination of points. That forces you to revise your mental picture of the map, and see it as fresh again.
Fun fact: if you remember your primary school combinatorial mathematics, you'll notice that there are fourteen different layouts of Hydro alone. (Still waiting for the fun part... - Ed)
Tom Francis PC Gamer Magazine
Khyron fucked around with this message on 05-18-2007 at 09:05 AM.
