Scout Update Day 4: Community Maps & Details

News by John Walker Co-founder

Published on Feb. 20, 2009

Friday brings us another community CP map by Sean ‘Heyo’ Cutino, CP_Egypt, and an update for previous community map, CP_Fastlane. There's also the details filled in for the achievements on yesterday's page, including spoilers for next week's weapon reveal via Russian site www.hl-inside.ru and the spoilsports at PC Gamer.

CP_Egypt is described by Valve as,

"A Dustbowl-style control point map, Egypt is visually striking, full of great combat spaces, and features some really interesting uses of vertical space. Classes with the ability to ascend rapidly (Soldiers, Demomen, and Scouts using the new scattergun unlockable) have lots of options for traversing the arenas. In addition, the ruins provide Engineers with a large number of potential sentrygun locations."

Then there's this info on changes for Fastlane,

"Fastlane is an update to one of the first community maps we shipped. This release features a wide variety of changes, from spawn and capture timer tweaks, to geometry and art modifications, to exploit fixes."

You'll have spotted the words "new scattergun" above, which was presumably intended to be a reveal for Monday or Tuesday, before HL-Inside blew the lid on it all. As well as detailing all the achievement requirements, they gave more details about the new scatter gun, hinted at in the pic on Thursday's update. Imagine if we'd had to wait a whole four days before knowing?! Valve have confirmed that it's called the Force-A-Nature, and from some of the achievement descriptions, it appears to be a shotgun with a uniquely powerful kick.

The Fall Classic achievement requires you to, "Cause an environmental death or suicide using the Force-A-Nature's knockback." Then there's Caught Napping which asks you to, "Kill 50 enemies from behind with the Force-A-Nature." Speculate away.

PCG spots a couple of other interesting moments in the achievements. Out of the Park wants you to, "Bat an enemy 25 meters," which they suggest implies stunned enemies may be sent flying. The other is Beanball, where you need to, "Stun a scout with their own ball." Which does rather suggest you can bat balls back again. This is going to get very silly.

Still no news on what that background image was all about, with the two parallel cart tracks.