The massive WAR! Even by today's standards, the patch was an avalanche of lore, weapons, new systems, and excitement that made the seven days it lasted a special experience for players. The highlights:. Framing the addition of a new item as a time-sensitive dramatic event in the TF2 timeline that players themselves had to participate in in order to resolve was a brilliant act of marketing, and we see this concept replicated in competitive games like Overwatch, Destiny 2, CS:GO, and Dota 2.
If you want your class to have it, you're going to have to fight for it. The Soldier and the Demo were natural rivals that, up until that point, hadn't had their yin-and-yangness formally expressed. They were both splash-damage classes with different styles: firing parabolically, or firing in a straight line.
They could both use their weapons to propel themselves forward. All of this fun helped to soften the introduction of a new crafting system, laying the groundwork for TF2's item economy. Valve would use this technique again when it introduced paid items and loot crates a year later not as a storefront, but in the form of a fictional character entity: Mann Co.
Although it wasn't without controversy and uproar, again, narrative framing and ample humor softened the landing microtransactions made on TF2, a much riskier and more novel concept in than it is today.
You weren't buying items from Valve, you were buying them from a shirtless Australian. It's true that plenty of Team Fortress 2's storytelling has been done outside of its. But in widening where its story was being told, Team Fortress 2 broke an old way of thinking, that a singleplayer campaign was the beginning and end of a game's fiction.
It's part of the reason we've stopped seeing multiplayer shoehorned into shooters like Prey, Wolfenstein, and Deus Ex. That approach has produced some of the most well-rounded and memorable multiplayer characters ever, ones that rival protagonists and villains from conventional games. At the point of Team Fortress Software's acquisition, production moved up a notch and the game was promoted to a standalone, retail product to tide fans over since, as well as time issues, much of the Team Fortress player base had purchased Half-Life solely in anticipation of the free release of Team Fortress 2.
Work began on a simple port of the game which was released in as the free Team Fortress Classic. Walker and Cook were heavily influenced by their three-month contractual stint at Valve, and began working full-time on their design, which was undergoing rapid metamorphosis.
Team Fortress 2 was to be a modern war game, with a command hierarchy including a commander, with a bird's-eye view of the battlefield; parachute drops over enemy territory; networked voice communication; and numerous other innovations. By this time Team Fortress 2 had gained a new subtitle, "Brotherhood of Arms" , and the results of Walker and Cook working at Valve were becoming clear. Several new, and at the time, unprecedented technologies were on show: parametric animation; seamlessly blended animations for smoother, more life-like movement; and Intel's multi-resolution mesh technology dynamically reducing the detail of on-screen elements as they become more distant to improve performance a technique made obsolete by decreasing memory costs, since today's games use a technique known as level of detail, which uses more memory but less processing power.
No release date was given at the exposition. In mid, Valve announced that Team Fortress 2' s development had been delayed for a second time. They put the news down to development switching to an in-house, proprietary engine that is today known as the Source engine. It was at around this time that all news ran dry, and Team Fortress 2 entered its notorious six-year vaporware phase, which was to last until July 13, During that time, both Walker and Cook worked on various other Valve projects — Walker was project lead on Half-Life 2: Episode One and Cook became a Steam developer among other things — raising doubts that Team Fortress 2 was really the active project that was being repeatedly described.
Template:See also. Human commando. See concept art. When the infamous Half-Life 2 source tree was leaked in late , two Team Fortress 2 models were included along with the Team Fortress 2 source code — which was fully compilable.
They consisted of an alien grunt and a very stylized, out-of-proportion human soldier. The code was interpreted by fans as making references to parts of the Half-Life backstory; however, the two leaked player models did not resemble any known style from the Half-Life series, leading many to think it was meant for Team Fortress 2. Some code merely confirmed what was already believed, but other segments provided completely new information such as the presence of NPCs in multiplayer matches, the possibility of the game taking place in the Half-Life 2 universe, fixed plasma gun and missile launcher emplacements, and more.
None of the leaked information appears to have had any bearing on today's version of the game. The next significant public development occurred in the run up to Half-Life 2's release: Valve's Director of Marketing Doug Lombardi claimed that Team Fortress 2 was still in development and that information concerning it would come after Half-Life 2's release.
This did not happen, nor was any news released after Lombardi's similar claim during an early interview regarding Half-Life 2: Episode One. Near the time of Episode One's release, Gabe Newell again claimed that news on Team Fortress 2 would be forthcoming — and this time it was.
Walker revealed in March that Valve had quietly built "probably three to four different games" before settling on their final design. Due to the game's lengthy development cycle it was often mentioned alongside Duke Nukem Forever , another long-anticipated game that went through many years of protracted development and engine changes before being released. The beta release of the game featured six multiplayer maps of which three contain optional commentary by the developers on game design, level design, and character design, and provide more information on the history behind the development.
Rather, it uses a more stylized, cartoon-like approach "heavily influenced by early 20th century commercial illustrations. The development commentary in the game suggests that part of the reason for the cartoonish style was the difficulty in explaining the maps and characters in realistic terms. The removal of an emphasis on realistic settings allows these questions to be sidestepped. The game debuts with the Source engine's new dynamic lighting, shadowing and soft particle technologies, among many other unannounced features, alongside Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
Team Fortress 2 was also the first game to implement the Source engine's new Facial Animation 3 features. The art style for the game was inspired by J. Leyendecker, as well as Dean Cornwell and Norman Rockwell. Their distinctive styles of strong silhouettes and shading to draw attention to specific details were adapted in order to make the models distinct, with a focus on making the characters' team, class, and current weapon easily identifiable.
Silhouettes and animation are used to make the class of a character apparent even at range, and a color scheme that draws attention to the chest area brings focus to the selected weapon. Maps are designed with a neutral space between two bases. They are archetypal spy fortresses, but disguised as inconspicuous buildings to give plausibility to their close proximities.
The maps have little visual clutter and stylized, almost impressionistic modeling, to allow enemies to be spotted more easily. Now, Team Fortress 2, that was a game long in the making.
The staggered development of Valve's iconic shooter took so long, and went through so many twists and turns, that it serves as the very embodiment of the expression "Valve Time". As in, Valve will release a game when it's damn well ready, regardless of how many changes it has to go through and how long it takes. A sequel to a hugely popular Team Fortress mod for Quake which would later also be released as a Half-Life expansion , Team Fortress 2 was first announced all the way back in , when Valve bought out TF Software Pty.
Ltd, the creators of the mod. Team Fortress 2 was originally planned to ship as a Half-Life expansion towards the end of It was delayed, however, and was not shown to the public for the first time until a year later. And couldn't be more different to the game we ended up with if it had tried. Going for a more "realistic" look than even the mildly sci-fi stylings of the original, Team Fortress 2 subtitled "Brotherhood of Arms", and whose demo you can see up top looked set to be a team-based shooter set in a near-future world that would feature large bases, an overall team commander, combat vehicles and even aerial drops.
Not your father's Xbox controller Brush up on your driving skills in Forza Horizon 5 with the controller the pros use. A year later, however - in - the game went dark. Valve told press that it had been delayed again while the game was ported over to the company's new internally-developed engine, Source.
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