05/01/2008

Team Fortress 2 : Bare Naked FPS Strategy

Written By Ed Borden From PWNING 9-5

The guys at Valve are my heroes. Seriously, the Orange Box is a work of art on so many levels, it starts to feel divinely inspired. Who is this Gabe Newell, anyway?! After playing through the Half Life 2 sequels and Portal, the last piece of the package is Team Fortress 2, which is like the parting gift that keeps on giving. Team Multiplayer FPS being my favorite genre by far, I was of course excited to play it.

No one can dispute that TF2 is one of the most unique looking FPS games out there. In fact, I think they forged the way for style to exist in the genre, and proved that FPS games don't need to be photorealistic to work. Valve's presentation at GDC this past February titled "The Illustrative World of Team Fortress 2" really shows that they had a calculated strategy in doing something so different. It worked, and EA's already in the middle of cooking up their own cartoon Battlefield on the heels of TF2's success. It's great to see the industry continue to develop as an artform.


The style innovation doesn't stop at the visuals, though. The unique classes in the game are so characterized that cinematics and machinima are almost part of the experience. Valve itself produced absolutely hilarious cinematic teasers to introduce the game and the classes that are so compellingly fun that it's got hard to be hard to resist buying the game just to get more. So don't watch them. The way that they were able to carry the personality and feel of the characters from those cinematics into the game itself is something I've never seen before like this. FPS character models are supposed to be cookie-cutter and boring in multiplayer!

As I said before, the goal of TF2 was obviously not perfect lifelike graphics. Instead, the focus was put on making the game easy, simple, and fun to play. Raw skill and reflexes don't make a big difference here, because every gun basically sucks. That's right -- Nothing shoots straight, nothing is all that powerful, and everyone moves slow as heck (except for the Scout). So, you're basically left with bare naked team strategy, in which the lone wolf player is completely worthless and more likely detrimental. If the team doesn't work together, there is no chance of winning. Since the game is pretty fun just running around and playing the different classes, I do see a lot of people online just not paying attention and sucking. It's definitely a tough byproduct of making a game that is so team-oriented and then playing on public servers, but I guess that's what having an awesome platform like Steam to find another game is for.


I love that Team Fortress 2 is saving me from an absolutely stale genre devoid of any decent games at the moment. I've had my fill of CS:Source and I was mortified by Frontlines, so basically what that says is that there hasn't been a decent game since Battlefield 2. That's like 4 years -- and that's depressing. Since TF2's been out since last year, I am actually pretty late to getting into this game, but if you haven't played it yet, you can get a taste for FREE this weekend (May 2-4). Valve is running a teaser special, a la First Slice). Give it a spin, and maybe I'll be there to wipe the floor with your face!

Written By Ed Borden

[Ed Borden is a C-Level Exec in the boutique PC industry, and blogs
about PC gaming, enthusiast hardware, and business at
http://www.edbordenblog.com]