Yep, that’s what’s happening. Comrade Francis from PC Gamer UK is over at Valve playing the new map stuff for TF2, and he’s posted some details over on C&VG.
Starting with just two new items for the Medic, Valve are going to be gradually rolling out new, unlockable weapons for every class. These will be alternative versions of their current loadouts that, once unlocked by earning a certain number of achievements, you can pick and choose from on a new ‘Loadout’ menu.
It sounds like Valve are just experimenting at the moment, so there aren’t many concrete details. It will expand the options available to the various classes however, which will inevitably please some players while infuriating those who thought they have the game nailed down.
Related Stories:
I have mixed feelings about tis, but it will be implemented anyway, so will wait.
But I’m looking forward for real new buildings for the engineer, not just slight modifications to the existing ones.
BTW: Goldrush mode was already discussed as a mod idea in the steam forums. I wonder if the user who suggested it was a valve employee testing peoples reaction.
But it doesn’t matter… The whole point of the unambiguous classes was to tell the Solider apart from the Demoman and the Heavy and Medic apart from the Spy and Scout.
A medic is still just a medic – who cares if he can heal faster or uber his team mates [...]
I do, for one. From moment to moment, more than any other shooter I can think of, fight-or-flight is the very heart of this game. Can I Win This Fight. Am I the ambusher, or the ambushee? Do I shoot, or do I go find another fight?
They’re saying that these unlockables are intended to have a real effect on the game – to neutralise Snipers’ one-shots in one loadout is one example they’ve given. I’m a Sniper, looking through my scope. Can I get the kill? Right now, I know, viscerally, from looking at the group of guys. When this goes into effect, I don’t until I identify whether this Medic I see is a Sniper-Nerfing Medic or a Non-Sniper-Nerfing Medic. Maybe it only takes a second, or less than a second – we’ve been trained for decades in some cases to pick up subtle shape changes – but for some classes that little annoying pang of uncertainty could occur hundreds of times per match, and it’s that very shock which they did however many complete rebuilds to keep out of this particular game.
Looking at five of TF2’s most precious USPs off the top of my head – its simple graphical beauty, its sense of humour, the streamlined class roles, the instant evaluation of enemies, and the relatively high usefulness of novices and dilettantes – this idea sideswipes three of the five. It could hardly be more diametrically opposite to what makes TF2, TF2. There are plenty of radical changes where I’d give Valve the benefit of a big fat doubt – you’d not hear a peep out of me if they’d added a class, or completely revamped a map or given the Medic a Redeemer or whatever, until I’d played it – but this, this just can’t fit. It’s not a question of balance or structure; if they roll this forward they will be literally dismantling, class by class, all that hard work they put into communicating with the player. That makes me sad and angry. I wonder if the people who made the game are still in charge of post-release development.
Gold Rush mode does sound awesome, though.
Hrm. There seems to be some mismatch in the Preview’s {blockquote} parsing versus actual {blockquote} parsing. Sorry about that, first time I’ve bothered with it.
I don’t think its a RPG thing, it is more rewarding players who stick to one class and try to master it. As long as the achievments are not too hard to get, no arm in that.
I play mainly soldier and I think it would be nice to have some variation, I don’t ask for a grenade launcher but maybe a faster rocket/less damage or a 2 rocket clip but more damage? That should allow player to try other playstyle.
And to be honest I am not hardcore, I have played this game on and off and I almost manage to unlock all of them, I just miss some from class I don’t play (like spy). And no I wasn’t playing to get them…
Gah! The BF2 unlocks WERE NOT SUPERIOR to the regular weapons. Anyone who says otherwise is simply wrong. The only exception was a special forces one that let you use flashbangs. Other than that the weapons were NOT better, they were different.
I was hoping that would be the case for TF2 but the propsed medic one sounds awful at the moment.
i’ve been playing as a medic for a while, a great way of learning the maps or just dropping into a quick match due to the relative simplicity of the class abilities (i.e. healing and not much else). I think that adding in these things for the medic first is in response to the fact that the medic doesn’t really do anything other than heal and use the ubercharge, so maybe this is Valve trying to compensate for that by giving medic players a little more tactical choice? If it is done well, with a positive response, then other fine tuning can be done on the other classes, maybe a direct fire weapon for the demoman? (nothing sucks more than being cornered as a demoman and not being able to shoot AT your target, but relying on splash damage that can also kill you).
I do agree that the system of hanging it on the peg of achievements isn’t really a good idea, UNLESS you can make the achievements ones that are easily accessible. Some are more easily gettable than others (for instance, joining one server i realised it was near the end of the match and i got the powerhouse offence achievement without doing anything, purely because i happened to join the winning team). So, rather than us all bitching about it here, let’s bitch over at Valve so they know what players want and don’t want- the majority should carry it, we hope…
Actually, the one achievement that’s eluded me so far is 10 kills from the one sentry gun. Any tips?
The day this comes out, everyone and their mother is going to be playing medic on both teams on public servers.
I’ve been waiting for a good opportunity to learn to play a Spy. >D
Damn, I got halfway through your post before I was forced to voice my concerns.
How long will it take me to kill people as a pyro when they have double health?
I know at the moment that a quick torching at close range and a few shells will do the trick. But now? I’m never going to be able to be as foolhardy as I can be now, simply because I’ll never know if I’m going to run into a soldier who simply WON’T burn to death.
And will your organised charge scatter and falter when I land in the middle of it and start burning you all?
They’d better make these unlockables with great care about which classes they will harm, otherwise it’ll be a gimmick, one that could drive away players who have been there since the beta.
Or, Maybe it’ll add a fresh burst of life by the time we’re getting a little tired of the vanilla TF2. Please Valve, Don’t fuck this up for us!
This is a great idea if only to see the speculation on the Steam Forums.
Valve: We removed grenades from TF2 because they were offputting to new players who died to grenade spam.
Steam Forums : OMGZ WER IS GRENDS. TF IZ NOT TF WITHOT GRENADE!!! I DEFINATELY WONT PLAY TF2! WTF NOOBS WITH NO GRENS WTF REALY
Valve: We are adding new loadouts which will make classes more rounded.
Steam Forums: WOOOOT!! GRENNS ARE BAKKK!!!!!!!!1
Heh. I swear they’re running office betting pools at Valve for every announcement, however minor.
“What are the odds of 3746 people losing their heads and going nuclear with doom-laden speculation?”
“Pretty darn high?”
I, for one, welcome our new loadout overlords. As someone who plays TF2 on a fairly regular basis (3-5 hours a week) I am by no means bored by the current classes, but it will be interesting to see additions and variations to play. At this point I’ve come to expect tactics from classes in certain situations (e.g. i’m a pyro going after a demoman, he’ll run backwards and try to sticky me.)
I wonder two things:
Will the new loadouts be visible parts of the character models? Maybe the new medic gun will be a different color or shape.
Will servers be able to disable the new loadouts feature? I bet there are already purists who will yearn for the original TF2 action.
In any case, I would trust Valve with my firstborn son, so hopefully they don’t let me down.
Can’t fucking wait.
If this is anything like the CoD 4 system of unlocking weapons and such, then I’ll be super pissed. I sucked at CoD 4 at first; not because I was particularly bad, but because everyone had more awesome weapons than I did and the default weapons weren’t worth a damn.
If this is more like Battlefield 2 weapon unlocks, I’ll be less pissed. BF2 handled the unlockables system well, I think, in that the unlockable weapons were only a little better than the default loadout. Yeah, people with unlockables had a slight advantage, but nothing serious enough to make the newer players completely inferior to everyone else.
Yay for something to expand the lifespan of the game, almost like an expansion pack, but in the size of a Bethesda downloadable, but better in one crucial way, IT’S FREEE!
My thoughts:
1. Heavies are going to be fucking hard to kill: bonus their ammo remains the same, meaning they won’t be minigunning for anything more than a little past half their lifetime.
2. Sentry Gun that can Walk- Imagine being able to choose to not have the rocket launcher, but instead stick with the level 2 sentry, but have it able to move, possibly while shooting, possibly while not being able to shoot, but still, capable of slowly walking from point to point, possibly faster as a level 1 sentry (fetch anyone? Go get the scout boy, go get im… 1 minute later … awwwe, good boy, you brought me a bat, thank you)
3. Alternate Spy Gadgets- I really like the idea of actually picking identities and taking them (making the other player vulnerable to team damage), from a previous post here, but I think it’d be semi-easy roundabout to turning on team damage for almost a whole team, which sorta makes the pyro lose alot of it’s value. Something more or less able to be spammed would be a limited supply version of the sapper, that would turn sentries against their engi builders and such and convert dispensers to poison allies and heal enemies (enemies and allies of the dispenser’s builder), but one would only have say 2, and no other sappers for that life, and they would die with the spy like stickies, returning the devices to normal function. Alternatively, a grapple would be very useful for surprising enemies (particularly if the spy can spread out on the ceilling rather than dangle).
4. Pyro Flamethrowers- Napalm, does less initial damage but keeps burning till they die, get healed or find water. Greek Fire would be an interesting alternative where it would go out in time, but water would make it burn worse (explosion perhaps?), but the ammo would be very limited (80 or something, with slightly less then current range). Either way, I’d like the option for a smoke grenade, it wouldn’t have far range, maybe even dropped like a ninja’s smoke bomb (with appropriate muffled dialog), but it would allow for a covered escape (pyro runs without a medic are almost suicide runs now) or confusion to burn people with, “smoke before FIRE”
5. Dynamite sticks as an alternative to stickies, very limited ammo, but BIG boom… maybe a dangerously short fuse to make it difficult to spam… mmmm, probably make a good drop on death weapon to screw with meleers, but hell, I like melee…. who knows
6. Sniper Camouflage- no NOT a cloak, sniper camouflage as in literal cover, like a barrel, a crate, a box, a false part of a wall, something that if you look at for more than a second you’d think was fishy, but something that’d you’d not notice at a passing glance unless you looked back. In exchange, no SMG, but more sniper ammo.
@Chemix “awwwe, good boy, you brought me a bat”
lol :)
I also like the sniper camouflage idea – though making it even more cartooney with eye holes and the like :)
Hypocee – “It’s not a question of balance or structure; if they roll this forward they will be literally dismantling, class by class, all that hard work they put into communicating with the player.”
I prefer to think of it as evolving the language. It’s certainly going to elevate the debate; certainly I’ll be pissed off every time I misjudge an opponent’s abilities and have some quiet time in the respawn queue to fume…
Looking forward to it – I could use a couple new excuses to have fun like a n00b.
You’ll still know what each class does.. I’m guessing they aren’t going to massively change the roles.
I think they should incorporate all this under a different mode. I myself welcome these changes but, I know a lot of people who want to play a more straight forward game. Not to mention it looks like a new game from the existing one. I don’t want to see it like the weapons market they did in CSS(filtered in server lists). Make it a different mode so people know before hand what to choose/not choose.
P.S: I love this game and I think valve will perfect it even more. :)
I like the idea of having the spy be able to turn sentries against their creators. Another thing that they could do is have it so that the spy can put a limited number of sappers and have it so everything that he put a sapper on turns off when he choses, and the buildings would stay off for about 10 seconds or so, the sappers would be one-shot, but the engies would not be able to take them off.
Hey, the new weapons are not more powerful than their previous brethren – it’s a tactical choice:
New gun: Heals you when you hit them, but can’t crit.
New healer: Gives 100% crit, doesn’t give invincibility.
New saw: Gives über-boost, is slower.
It’s a tactical choice you’ll have to take, it’s not upgrading – it’s options