Team Fortress 2 Beta

By Vermouth

This week Valve took the lid off of the Orange Box, allowing people who pre-purchased it to get in on the beta of Team Fortress 2. Playing the game again has been a hoot. It is a lot like Team Fortress (and Classic), only different in some key areas. It retained all that you like about the old game, 2 fort, Dustbowl, rocket jumping, flag running, engineers, and above all it maintains that feeling of tightly directed chaos that made the prior Team Fortress games great. But what it does differently is how it makes all the classes valuable, and it does away with some of the more spammy elements of the game. It also does a lot more to encourage playing as a team than the previous game.

I’m not going to run down each and every class, but they’re all very good at what they’re supposed to do. There are nine classes in the game and several have received substantial retouches. The Scout no longer relies on specialized grenades, but can now raise all kinds of hell with his scatter-shotgun, baseball bat, and double jumping abilities. The Medic now functions as a much more dedicated healer than we’ve really seen in any FPS to date, using a heal gun to keep guys in the fight and when things get really bad, you can fire up an ubercharged shot which makes you and your target invulnerable. You might miss the ability to use medics to give the other team the plague but they are so effective at their support role that it would be a bit much to give them a powerful damage ability as well. Spies are also now essential, as they’re really the only easy way to take out engineers. They are also more effective at killing things than they ever were in Team Fortress Classic. All the other classes more or less assume their roles from TFC, Demomen and Soldiers blow stuff up and Heavy Weapons Guy have a heavy weapon etc. I’m hesitant to praise the game for its balance as it’s not even out to retail yet, but as of this writing the classes are all very balanced, there is no class which doesn’t have an effective counter to them, and there isn’t a class that’s completely useless in the hands of a talented player.

The graphics on this game are really impressive. The game looks and sounds like a comic book adventure. It’s so funny when you shoot a guy with a rocket and he blows up right in front of me in a very cartoony style. While in some games it can be very difficult to tell one team from another at first look, in this game even all the way across the map it’s easy to make out the team and class you’re facing and react accordingly. The sound works with that to contribute to a very fun feeling game. The characters all have suitably funny audio taunts which they can perform on command. Related to that, while this game does feature voice over-IP support out of the box, I was surprised how pleasant the community has been, relaying what class the spies in the base are rather than how much of a faggot people are. Being used to Live, this was a considerably less hostile environment.

I don’t know how long the legs on this one are going to be. That’ll depend on a lot of factors to be determined, like how the community shapes up and if the game gets hijacked by the most hardcore players. That said, for a beta I have a lot of hope for where this one is going. I’m almost hesitant to say this but… this game launched with some pretty serious bugs. Fortunately Valve has pushed out two updates already and they appear to have the bugs on the run. Something could come up at any time but it is a beta so I can’t be too harsh on them for that. At any rate this has been a bucket of fun.