Team Fortress 2 gets it right
Over the past several months, Cyde Weys and I have been enjoying some of the finest multiplayer gaming yet devised. Of course, I am referring to none other than Team Fortress 2. This class based multiplayer FPS has provided us with countless hours of engrossing gameplay.
Team Fortress 2, or “Teef”, as we affectionately call it, has one key advantage over many other multiplayer shooters. The class based nature of the game, the gamemodes, and the overall balancing greatly encourage and reward team based gaming.
This format provides a lot of value to gamers who actively play often with friends. Cyde Weys, another friend of ours, and I often form a formidable trio when we play. In fact, I very rarely play the game without being accompanied by at least one friend. This is because it is simply a great deal more fun playing with people you know. The three of us together are often capable of dominating the scoring on servers, in large part due to our ability to coordinate with one another. This is often a decisive advantage over an enemy team with less cooperation.
There are certain key aspects of the game that make this all possible:
- Headsets - These days, it goes without saying that a multiplayer game will have voice chat support. However, it wasn’t that long ago that voice chat was uncommon. Obviously, this feature provides a vastly improved form of communication in comparison to the old method of typing messages. Of course, headset communication is still in some ways inferior to the much older “shouting across the hall” method.
- Class variety - This is of course standard fare in MMOs. However, in FPS gaming, it is rare for a game to have the level of class differentiation that Teef offers. In many cases, two different classes working together are vastly more effective than the sum of the two working individually. The most obvious case of this is the Medic + Heavy combo, but it is also true of many other class combinations.
- Emergent gameplay - I hate to utilize the much overused term “emergent”, but it is a good description of Teef gameplay. The basic game mechanics are extremely simple. Each character class and weapon can be catagorized by just a few simple statistics. Nonetheless, the large number of class combinations and the variety in map types makes for some fairly tactical gameplay. Once you have played for a while, you will understand. Teef is far more nuanced than your ordinary shooter.
- Unique flavor - This is ultimately a secondary concern compared to the above points. However, the cartoony graphical style lends a certain fun, humorous appeal to the game. While I oftentimes find myself lost in the gameplay, I do occasionally sit back and just appreciate the bizzare cartoon humor that permeates the whole experience.
As you can surely tell if you actually read the article, I am a big TF2 fan. Of course, if you haven’t actually played the game, much of what I said above won’t make much sense to you. To properly understand, you need to devote a fair number of hours to the Teef experience.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:35 pm
The voice communication is absolutely key. I have way more fun playing Teef when many of the people on my team are intelligently coordinating strategy using voice chat. I also have a lot more fun for other reasons. Some people are just damn funny. We once played on a server that had a guy doing a perfect impression of the old whistling pedophile from Family Guy. It was made all the more funnier because he was saying normal Teef things, just in that voice. Needless to say, it was hysterical.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:21 am
I agree with you guys completely, not only is voice comm essential for success in the game, its fun as hell! Coordinating attacks, taking shit to other players, identifying spy’s, etc all a must! The most fun game I was ever apart of was 5am with a bunch of other intoxicated players. Granted we may not have been playing the best, but the chatter going on the whole time was priceless. Most fun I’ve ever had being called a racist on voice chat. Thank you gaming gods for voice chat capabilities, games like Teef 2 will never get old because of this feature!! I also want to add, I was a hater when the game first came out due to its “cartoon look”. The other games I thought of that were kinda crappy just due to this look: Jet Set Radio Future, The Simpson’s game, and all the newer zelda games. Sorry, but it didn’t do it for me, I gave them all a giant MEH. Maybe its just due to the fact that there was no giant nataschas, excessive sammich eating, broken whiskey bottles, or crit rockets. But Teef you got it right, you are the first cartoon game I have thoroughly appreciated whole heartily, thank you for letting me waste days of my life with you.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I was the one calling Bobby the racist over voice chat, but I did so after he made a comment disparaging a group of people grouped not by race but by interest in another game. Everyone else who was up at 5am found it to be hysterical.
October 23rd, 2008 at 1:34 am
I lost interest in TF2 after playing for a month post-release. Haven’t been back since, though I’ve been meaning to. CoD4 ended up being my main game. D:
October 24th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
There’s no sophistication to it. All the subtlety that was in Team Fortress Classic has been excised. It’s incredibly slow, theres no weapons movement with grenades and concussion.
The fact it’s so teamplay dependent means its virtually unplayable on public servers. I don’t enjoy the overcharge mechanic either. You watch a professional match and it’s all just people hanging back charging up for 2 minutes, then attack. Wait for 2 minutes. Then attack. I don’t like the capture point style of play, but you’re stuck with it because even the scout is so fast capturing the flag is fantastically difficult.
The only thing I enjoyed about it was the fantastic graphical style.
There’s a third party mod called Fortress Forever that I’d always recommend over TF2. It’s like TFC, except even faster. Every class has a few uses and is useful by itself. It’s the kind of game you’d never, ever be able to play on a joypad so I think that’s why Valve went in the ultra slow direction with TF2. But I don’t like the compromise.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
*meant to say “even the scout is so slow”
October 25th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Molloy: What do you mean Team Fortress 2 is slow? It’s incredibly fast-paced, almost too much so for my tastes. I’m wondering what you’re comparing it to that you consider it slow. You’ve obviously never played America’s Army then, a game in which each round lasts ten minutes and once you’re dead, you’re dead. I would spend a couple of minutes crawling along the ground to get into a good position on some maps and loved every second of it. The anticipation of the fight was what sold that game for me. Team Fortress 2 is on speed and cocaine by comparison.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:55 am
It’s not incredibly fast paced. I already explained what I’m comparing it with. TF2 is 3 times slower than the game it’s replacing: Team Fortress 1 or Team Fortress Classic. And about 5 times slower than Fortress Forever, the third party equivalent.
Americas Army, Armed Assualt, Red Orchestra, Insurgency (HL2 mod) are all slow, but they’re all realistic military sims.
Team Fortress in the traditional sense had utterly different gameplay from TF2. It used to be a frantic game of trying to catch Medics and Scouts blasting into the flag room and away with the flag before you could blink. Now it’s a case of medic+soldier/heavy waiting for 2 minutes, overcharging, then strolling in and killing everybody and wander back to your base while the opponents all wait to respawn. It’s yawnsome stuff.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I really don’t think you gave the game enough of a chance Molloy, but it’s hardly ever like what you’re describing. You seem to be complaining about the CP maps being too slow (the PL maps, though they weren’t around when you played it, have the same “problem”). But the CTF maps are as exactly as fast-paced as they were in TFC. Heck, the new 2fort is actually significantly faster-paced than the 2fort from TFC, because they eliminated the water in the underground tunnels, so you can run through them significantly faster.
Long story short, I simply don’t know where you’re getting the claim that TF2 is 3X slower than TFC from, because I’ve played them for hundreds of hours each and I feel that the pacing is pretty much the same. If anything, the pacing is quicker in TF2, because ubercharging allows you a nearly foolproof avenue for taking down sentries that simply didn’t exist in the past game.
October 29th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
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