Update – The achievement descriptions are up, and they pretty much confirm everyone’s favourite guess for weapon upgrade three, the “Sandvich”. The Konspicuous Konsumption achievement requires that you “eat one hundred sandviches,” which makes them seem a pretty solid bet.
Sasha has a playmate. Valve’s cunning trick of stringing out their update announcement to forty-seven days is working, as proven by today’s Heavy Update Post: Natascha is the new member of the familiy, the second revealed unlockable weapon, and she’s very pretty.
This is a rather fascinating new weapon. When minigun Natascha’s bullets enemies hit a player, they will slow them down, just for a moment. A slightly weaker weapon (25% less), she’s not designed for face-to-face combat, but rather dealing those crowds of weakling retreating opponents, who will find themselves forced to either find a hiding place, or turn and face you, “mano-a-tiny-itty-bitty-mano.”
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@ Vanderdecken
I think this’d be a good idea too. The whole concept of unlockables is that they’re a fun optional part of the game, but I do think the capacity to put whether you want to game with them at server-side seems a reasonable approach to the situation.
@Y3k-Bug: The earliest case of multiplayer unlockables I can think of is Battlefield 2.
@Sum0: agreed, that’s the earliest that springs to mind. I remember Tim Edwards’ glowing review in PCG raving about them changing the gameplay mechanics in a major way, and keeping players more involved for longer. Now every developer (and sometimes publisher) is obsessed with the bloody things – it’s not a good game if it hasn’t got some lame set of achievements to ‘earn’ in multiplayer. I for one think the idea is growing very old very fast. Not that some implementations of it haven’t been good, but it seems like the latest buzzword between big game developers, which will evolve into a dreaded situation like EA pre-Crysis – just churning out the same old vapid crap constantly, with the usual string of barely though out achievements. Valve have managed to pull it off for me recently, but in a couple of cases only just.
If you can’t take down a heavy as a scout, you’re doing it wrong. Baseball bat to the head, baby. That really pisses them off.
Stealth update to the heavy site today, telling us the achievement requirements:
http://steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/kgb.htm
Valve have obviously learned their lesson from the medic pack – almost all of them seem pretty doable in regular play. Even moreso than the pyro’s.
I understand Goombas and Koopas, but Bullet Bill are just too difficult for a new player to handle. Why would Miyamoto intentionally alienate new players like that?
I think that this is my view on the whole thing as well. New weapons are lovely, but the road to get them isn’t so much.
Agreed with Vanderdecken as well, especially when the same starter weapons are as bare and powerless as the ones in COD4 are.
Just seen the achievements. As an occasional medic I am very concerned about “Photostroika: Provide an enemy with a freezecam shot of you taunting while invulnerable.”. Are all my ubered heavies going to be taunting when they should be killing? Imho this is exactly the kind of achievement Valve should be avoiding, as it involves working to the detriment of your team, and in this directly against the medic who worked to gain that ubercharge. Nightmare.
I’m not against achievements/unlocks in principal, but I really think the nature of the achievements needs to be carefully considered.
What’s wrong with them doing it after you’ve just wiped out a wave and you have 2 seconds of charge left? It’s not like it has to be done after every kill…
I think what he’s afraid of is that heavies will spam it. You only need to do it once to get the achievement, though, which means it shouldn’t be a huge issue.
@ the naysayers: When they first started talking about achievements for the Medic oh so long ago, I was in the “zomg, they’ve ruined TF2 and I’ll never play again bar bar bar…” school of thought. I’m not a very good player, so I figured all these achievements, and hence super-awesome weapon upgrades would go to the talented and/or hardcore. In the months since the Medic update, I’ve discovered that this is true.
Except it doesn’t matter.
Valve did a brilliant job of making the new weapons desirable, useful, and rather well balanced (exception: the Backburner), but not a necessary part of gameplay. While my friends spent hours farming for the Ubersaw, I just kept playing, occasionally working on a lol-worthy achievement, like one of the freezecam ones.. I have earned only the Blutsauger and Kritzkreig, and they are nice, but my play experience hasn’t suffered because I don’t have weapons that my enemies have.
I get where the “all weapons should be available to everyone” comments are coming from, and I respect those, but some people are saying that “achievements should reward the hardcore, not punish the non-hardcore.” Reward/punishment seems like a matter of perspective and/or hurt feelings.
In short: I thought achievements & weapon upgrades would screw up the game. Experience has proven me wrong. Now excuse me while I go for a sandvich….
“Erlam, don’t you read official TF2 forums? It is 99% confirmed Heavy will get a sandwich – a portable medkit healing him +100 HP. So they found a way to make Heavy less Medic dependent.”
Is it like a one-use per life thing? Because 100 is great, that’s what, one near-miss rocket? He’s still dependent on constant healing.
At least, sort of.
I still find it odd they’re doing the Heavy changes now. It’s my second least played class, but has my most kills, most points, and most.. something else. Defenses or something.
@Erlam
It was also one of the least played classes overall. It was about tied with scout for least played when I looked last week but it’s going up since people are anticipating the update.
I think they tend to do the updates for the lesser played classes so I expect the scout to be the next update.
I think one of the reasons Heavies aren’t played much is you can’t field a team of them (which will make this release hilarious), but you can say, have 4 soldiers, or 3 snipers, etc.
I would have gone with scout, myself. I fear the Soldier/Demo updates though. Crit explosives already are… interesting.
Also:
“Party Loyalty: Kill 50 enemies within 3 seconds of them attacking your Medic.”
I’m assuming that’s .. over time, right? I just did a double take while reading that, haha.
There’s a new update, if any of the four horsemen are around to post about it.
ARENAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Another use for scouts is to keep the cart from rolling back on Payload maps. He only has to stay alive long enough to touch the damn thing. Yes, I know, if the other side is awake he really shouldn’t be able to get anywhere near it, but even if he gets butchered your attempt can open up opportunities for others on your team to do some damage.
What I would take out is that whole juvenile apparatus of dominations and revenges. I couldn’t give a flying fffft who’s dominated me, or how many times I’ve died. Only one thing counts — did my team win? I thought that’s why they called it TEAM Fortress. Including anything that tends to stoke individual egos is counterproductive.
And can we have a simple word filter on the comments too, or some sort of alarm for servers? There isn’t much of it compared to some other games, but I don’t like it much when someone just offed by the Demoman starts typing “n*gger n*gger n*gger.” I think I see why Valve made the Demo a Scotsman as well as black — might as well dilute the stereotyping by parodying him at an angle to the way he looks (not that there aren’t black Scotsmen).
@sunsin: A lot of servers that run local stat-tracking software, like HLStats-X, implement some kind of word filter. I play on The Ville servers a lot, and you occasionally see some censored chat lines (omg, it’s full of stars). And frequently when someone is griefing another player over voice chat, the server will tell people to behave. I don’t know if there just happens to be an admin on who is quick with that, or they have fancy voice recognition software!
I wish I had fancy voice recognition software.