I’ve officially been playing tf2 for 11 years. I’ve been playing on and off for most of my adult life, but this is the most consistently I’ve played since I started in 2010.
I’ve been thinking about the social design ethos a lot recently, mostly with how tf2 is designed on the foundation of dedicated server based pub shooters. It’s interesting listening to the developer commentary now and hearing them describe a great many class design decisions as the result of wanting to foster particular meaningful relationships between players based on the naturally occurring relationships that spring up in those kinds of communities; I feel like this is why I still interact with pub snipers in much the same way as I did in 2010 (throwing urine at each other before typing ‘explode’ in console.) It’s a bit too early for a post mortem (the game refuses to die) but I really need to pick this thing apart, share experiences with others etc.
In my opinion it’s still one of the best games ever made, it simply got worse.
this was maybe the first time i bought a game excited to try it out and just never got round to it before it became f2p. i’m glad people are still getting something out of it
TF2 is unfortunately infested with bots that do all sorts of funny stuff like aimbotting, and also spam servers with extremely racist all-says, so the population on public servers has been dwindling and dwindling.
Really funny actually, there’s like, good bots and evil bots, and they’re having a war. It’s fascinating to watch. But also super disgusting and vile that it has come to this point.
I’m a big fan of the idea that Valve seemingly fell into being the last big supporter of modern (“modern”) multiplayer games built around just letting people do whatever the fuck w/r/t hosting, modding and discovery and all three of their major pillars (TF2, L4D and CSGO) are still kicking a decade or more later in the face of games with little to no community support provided (DICE, I love Battlefield and I love you but the whole “no, just rent a server from us” thing ain’t it chief)
of course, this has the knock on effect that it’s very hard to play the games as they were (not even a “I want to play vanilla/no loadouts/hats are bad” thing, more of a “sometimes I want the stock-ass experience and not a server with a billion tracking and XP mods installed”). but the prevalence of such things in the community are because the community controls the community, not the developer, and that’s ultimately a net good
in the past while ive been nostalgic for tf2 and have seen a lot of videos about how bad its gotten but it sounds like there are some servers that are nasties free like uncletopia the number stop for uncles. ive been meaning to try them out but idk if itll please the nostalgia
really can valve just hand the ip over to everyone at this point theres rumors they just have 3 guys running the whole thing
I play on uncletopia pretty frequently, actually. They’re a surly bunch of nerds with heated opinions about game balance but the server experience has been mostly pleasant so far. It’s an active community, which I didn’t expect to see in 2021, and most everyone is conscious about keeping the space friendly.
I don’t think I would be playing tf2 again now if it weren’t for uncletopia, really. It’s one of the few places I still feel the ghost of ‘server culture’, and that alone is curious enough for me to want to poke my head in from time to time.
TFC (the original half-life 1 version) was the first video game I got really into - joined a couple clans (Hell’s Infernal Executioners (lmao) and uhhh I forget the others), hung out on IRC, made friends with the people who wrote for the TF news site I was into (planetfortress or something?), even somehow got invited to write for a site for some reason? Lots of time on vent and ICQ too. It was my big start into the world of online gaming. I juuust missed Quake (and thought it looked ugly)
I remember TFC turning into TF1.5 as Valve publicly started work on TF2, the high res skins they added to make it look less cartoonish and more in line with what they had planned for half-life 2 at the time
At some point I fell off and started playing more counterstrike (ah beta 5) and that’s when I started hanging out with the neighborhood kid that would eventually introduce me to IC at a LAN party in his basement where we played stupid CS maps all night after the Tab shotgunning contest
It wasn’t until I was in college that the Orange Box came out, I remember sitting in my apartment in Huntsville, downloading Steam for the first time while I was away on an internship
I played fairly avidly, though no clans this time. Fell off once loadouts and drops became a thing though I did watch most of the Introducing the X videos as they revamped the pyro etc. I think pyro was my favorite to play in those days
Not long after I met my now-wife I gifted her a computer cobbled together from some old parts and somehow she got really into TF2. We’d play together sometimes but she kept playing long after I did. She didn’t really pick up another FPS until Overwatch, I guess class based shooters were her thing
I can’t remember the last time I played. The game got way to complex with the events and loadouts and loot crates and the meta I just couldn’t keep up.
But I wouldn’t be where I am today without team fortress
Sorry for the brain dump I just got kinda led down memory lane
First-person shooters really lost the magic once they shifted into lobby-only matchmaking. I have so many fond memories of individual servers I played on, from Unreal Tournament to Tribes to Modern Warfare. I even ran some servers for a while (WorldVillage UT2k4, TIGFortress 2, and a shitposter CS server I can’t remember the name of) which had their own little flow of players coming in and out.
When you’re always playing together with friends, or otherwise cohabitating a space with players of like mind, it helps convert the competitive urge from “I am the dominator” to “we are all learning this game together”. Lobby games are SO toxic, partially because I think they encourage a tournament mindset of “I must always win”. As someone who plays competitive games mostly to socialize in an environment where my opponent is less predictable than an AI (whose puzzle I am compelled to solve), I’d much rather play two dozen matches against someone who can crush me but is my friend and a good sport about it, than one match against some chode who is gonna rage at me for using a gun they dislike.
I lament the loss of community servers at least once a week, sometimes once a day. And it depresses me that I am now playing games like Destiny 2 with people who have NEVER experienced the joy of settling in with your friends for a night of goofing off at the local pubTeam Fortress 2 | 24/7 2fort | Lowgrav | Voice spam
If you haven’t played tf2 in a while (or ever) I do honestly recommend jumping into a match on uncletopia or some other community server and seeing how you feel about it now. I want to know if anyone else has experienced the same kind of deja vu I’ve been feeling lately. I keep having moments where I stop and think “I’ve had this exact same interaction before, 10 years ago” and it’s part of why I wanted to take a closer look at the game with the benefit of 14 years of hindsight.
do people still play the quake team fortress (never tried it, but generally prefer quake to half-life)? i’m interested in that one particularly
my experiences with valve-era tf are mostly unpleasant but i was not around for the TF2 launch, only played TFC before and TF2 long after. for someone who barely played any of these games, what does TF2 do that quake TF/half-life TFC don’t?
HL TFC plays a lot like Quake TF from what I remember, at least as far as class identities go. The movement is different, and I don’t remember if Quake TF has class grenades, but healing is similar and the general class profiles are the same.
TF2 is WAY different. No poisoning, no class grenades, much more restricted movement, heals are a beam from the medigun, ubercharge, and eventually all the loadout stuff. Old TF/TFC is very much in the spirit of community goofing off, whereas TF2 is when it starts to drift into “let’s try to make this professional/competitive”.
Much bigger maps
A wider variety of objectives, for example the payload game type is new in TF2
The classes are the same but their abilities are different, for example TF2 gave medics a chargeable ability (default version is the ubercharge but later equipment has other options)
The very first set of alternate weapons, before hats: this was TF2 at its best, and still hasn’t been beat imo
Even to this day not enough is said about TF2’s absolutely impeccable aesthetic, it is Valve at the peak of their powers. Maybe their best work, and I’m a “Half-Life 2 is a miracle” guy
I haven’t played valve or quake tfc because I was essentially introduced to pc shooters through the orange box, but I think if I had to summarize tf2’s main features/design goals:
As few generalist classes as possible, with each class possessing pronounced strengths and weaknesses. Grenades from tfc were removed, so each class has a limited set of options for dealing with enemies/players need to consider matchups
Primary focus on the interplay between classes (the sniper is weak to the spy and scout, etc) means players need to consider team composition. This is so players can’t/don’t fall back into their comfort zone and pick their favourite class in every situation
Meta/contextual social mechanics encouraging teamwork. Stuff like the baked-in voice commands for alerting your teammates about different game states, having your medic’s name on screen when you’re being healed etc. A general emphasis on communication without requiring the kind of precise (and regularly heated) callouts ala Counter-Strike. There are also more esoteric ‘support points’ for doing things like extinguishing on-fire teammates or teleporting other players, but these are less obvious and the game doesn’t draw much attention to this
Adversarial negative feedback motivators like the domination/revenge system to encourage players to coordinate around problem opponents
Map design focused around problem spots for large, hectic team confrontations. Most maps have limited flanking routes and force the majority of players through chokepoints or sniper alleys with limited resources.
I think most of these things have been iterated on endlessly at this point (it’s hard not to find a class or character-based shooter in 2021 ime), and I feel exhausted when I think about playing something like Overwatch, but it works well with tf2 in particular because of the pick-up-and-play structure of casual server-based shooters. Anyone can play Medic and do well, for example.
Whether the game manages to do any of this well in its current state is something I’m still thinking on
Yeah I was also a big big TFChead who dipped into TF2 on a couple occasions but fell off it basically once I had a full time job / only a laptop. It felt super different for all the reasons stated above. I hadn’t ever played the original Team Fortress; checking out a video it looks like it controls identically but maybe doesn’t have all the sorts of grenades and weapons.
I would be into playing this with people!
Did they ever make a TF2 version of that ball game mode with the 4 teams/bases? Murderball or whatever?
how could a game so poorly balanced that the devs resorted to forcing psuedo-Highlander rules into the main play modes be everything wrong with games today
