Sunday 24 April 2011

TF2 Throughout History

I don't know about you, but there's something fun about cartoon people running around and shooting each other.
Team Fortress 2 is a game where the RED team and BLU team are in a war for some odd reason. There's 9 classes to choose from, each with their own customizable clothing and weapons.

When I first played this game, 3 years ago, there were only 3 weapons for every class plus a a couple of weapon packs for Pyro and Medic. Even with this small amount of uniqueness in the game, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I mean, what wasn't there to love? You could do anything you wanted to. The two weapon packs released were really awesome too. The items were sidegrades, they both would have a negative and positive of similar value.

Rating at the time: 9.5/10


Now, I really expected the following weapon packs to be of similar quality to the two previously released. It was obvious from the next weapon pack (Heavy), that weapons were no longer suitable as a sidegrade. An example is the Killer Gloves of Boxing, easily more powerful than fists. This resulted in everyone just swapping out to them, making fists useless. Every other weapon pack following had this similar problem. Either the weapons were awfully more powerful or disgustingly worse than the originals.

I thought, once all the class updates were complete that I could enjoy a game with slightly different gamplay than what I originally bought it as. New strategies were being created and new game modes were being added. Once all updates were released Valve would probably balance the weapons, right? I mean, what else could they do?

Even thought I played in competitive a lot more than I did in public servers, I knew the game had still the same feel of when I bought it. It was still a great game, even in public servers.

Rating at the time: 8.5/10


Now, the next update is when the game changed a lot. Originally, when backpacks were released everyone suspected TF2 to turn into a FPSRPG, which made me extremely excited, as that idea blew my mind away. Crafting weapons was the beginning of a total overhaul of changing the design of the game. It was no longer a simple game, where you enter a server and kill idiots, it was more about sitting in the corner of spawn creating new items.

Then came the idling system. Valve wanted more people to play the game by introducing these new concepts to the game but they created a game which rewards standing in spawn (or an idle server) afk for hours on end. OK fine, I'll admit that I did it too, but it was only due to the massive craze at that time. The rare items some people possessed, more known as 'hats' were the thing that every player saw in their dreams.

Now, once Valve decided that they reached a minimum profit of TF2 sales, they decided to try something different. TF2 item store. It was amazing how Valve did this. They didn't force anyone to buy anything, but they made players do it by offering them an item (crate), which is useless, unless you buy a key which allows you to open it and have a very, very small chance of getting a hat with added particles on it, called unusual hats.

Instantly everyone was buying them. I recall someone I knew who bought 50 keys and unlocked 50 crates. He recieved no unusual hats. This perhaps shows you the small gambling element that Valve introduced. With this drop chance, it caused unusual hats to peak at a cost of $500 US. Crazy if someone bought that right? Well people actually did, a lot of people.

So you might think that all my hate goes out to unusual hats being hinted as something magical to the community, but that's not where my hate is aimed at. THE WEAPONS.

 I opened TF2 last week and entered a server to where I saw people running around when I first played the game, only with hats, socks, beards and guns which do not even suit the 1950's theme of TF2. I went scout, I ran outside my spawn and got killed in one hit by a charging scottsman who hit me with a grenade on a stick (god knows what it actually was). Anyway, I decided to play on until the point where I couldn't take it anymore. Then I remembered why I don't play the game anymore.

Playing time: 0.6 hrs past 2 weeks
Total hours: 2463.7 hrs  (including idling)

RATING: 4/10



Well that was a hell of a writeup. Just wanted to share my opinion of the game as it progressed throughout the years. I might be a bit too tough on Valve :P

8 comments:

  1. i loved the original TF but cant seem to bring myself to even play TF2 =/

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  2. I agree. TF2 was so much better before all the ridiculous content patches.

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  3. Wow what a drastic change in the game. I really despise companies that release item stores to the community because it just makes the game not as balanced *cough* Blizzard *cough*

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  4. I don't mind it too much. But it would take more than hats and such to make me quit my TF2 addiction.

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  5. you know, that's the one game in that collection i still haven't played :(

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  6. TF2, still fun to play on

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  7. I'm bad on all classes equally but I find TF1/2 to be ridiculously fun.

    Thanks for the review.

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