Stayin' alive

Playing a Medic is an experience unlike any other. Walker, Brown, and co. might take umbrage at such a statement--after all, the whole point of TF2 is that one should be able to say that about any of its classes. While that is true, it is just a little more true for the Medic. "We wanted to move the focus from ten guys working together to two guys working together," explained Walker--that is, there should still be an overall sense of teamplay, but players will also be putting much more of a focus on buddying up into smaller units. At the center of this is the Medic, equipped with a retro-futuristic health beam gun (and an amusing syringe launcher). A Medic is in his element when latched onto another class, keeping his health beam continuously firing and keeping his partner healthy. This is particularly effective with a Heavy, who is big and slow-moving enough that he needs the protection, and will not outpace the Medic.

While beaming health, the Medic is slowly building up progress on a secondary meter. Upon filling that meter, the Medic can unleash ten seconds of invulnerability for himself and his partner. It is easy to imagine how devastating--and wonderfully enjoyable--this is when applied to a Heavy during a base assault.

To get his charge up, the Medic wants to be constantly healing. This means that, while there is a definite skill involved in being a good Medic who can stick to his buddy, switch to healing others when necessary, and unleash his charge at the appropriate time, there is also a level of skill involved in being a good partner to a Medic. While effective at keeping others alive, the Medic is not particularly well-equipped to keep himself alive while under fire, so it is crucial for his partner to position himself in such a way that the Medic can remain behind cover or out of the enemy's line of sight, while still being in a position that allows the Medic to retain line of sight to his buddy with his heal gun.

The Engineer, with his array of defensive and support structures, contributes to the team's success in the most indirect way, but in a way that leaves a lot of room for tactical consideration and potential firepower. Armed with a shotgun, pistol, and heavy wrench, he can take care of himself in combat to a reasonable degree, but his strength is building sentry turrets, health and ammunition dispensers, and teleporters. The usefulness of these devices speaks for itself. The Engineer has a unique ability among the classes to gather not just ammunition but also scrap metal, which he can use to upgrade his turrets up to a potential third stage; when upgraded, they impossibly transform into larger and more imposing devices, robotically expanding themselves out of nowhere in the style of Command & Conquer buildings.

Amusingly, the building and upgrading of turrets is achieved by bashing them with the wrench. Additional Engineers can join in to speed the process along. On one occasion, while building a defensive sentry in a crucial choke point, I had two other Engineer teammates run over and begin lending their wrenches to the process. The sight of three Engineers hunched over a self-constructing turret, all bashing the hell out of it with wrenches, is a brilliant moment.

Keeping the pace

As a studio, Valve has always been highly concerned with pacing. This is evident going back to the original Half-Life, still one of the most intensely-paced shooters ever developed. Half-Life 2 brought a range of new interactions into the mix, and Half-Life 2: Episode One took Half-Life 2's breadth and compressed it into a tightly-wound, expertly-paced package. Multiplayer is a different story, however. How can you possibly design pacing into a game when many players are killing each other, respawning constantly, and running around in an arena that is necessarily much less structured than a single-player environment?

Valve has given that question a lot of thought, and Walker and Brown shared with me some of their answers. For example, like seemingly most of Valve's design decisions, that Medic invulnerability charge serves multiple purposes. Most fundamentally, it adds depth and value to the Medic class and allows otherwise vulnerable or easily-targeted classes the brief opportunity to overcome that weakness. In a more overarching sense, it allows a team the opportunity to turn the tides if the game has reached a stalemate, with one team dug in with a heavily-fortified defense. A few Medic-equipped pairs can build up their charge and break through the enemy line (frantically shouted phrases such as "Invuln coming!" can be heard around Valve's offices during play sessions). Similarly, if a conservatively-playing team suspects that its opponents are hanging back and charging their Medics, they might be encouraged to press forward and disrupt those plans.

Team Fortress 2 has a sudden-death mode, activated if there is no victor once the game's timer runs out, that supercedes the actual objective to be completed. In sudden death, the game becomes Counter-Strike-like, with players losing the ability to respawn. If a team can manage to achieve its objective or kill all members of the opposing team, it wins. This allows for a significant change in pace, and injects a shot of intensity into a game that, with neither team having made sufficient headway when the clock ticks down, may well have been in need of it. It also has the side benefit of giving less experienced players the opportunity to spectate longer than usual, while occurring rarely enough that the game does not lose the fast Team Fortress feel.

Maps are now inherently tied to gametypes, sure to be a controversial decision, particularly since the game will ship with only six maps. Walker explained that, in multiplayer games, online players tend to stick to only a few maps and play them almost exclusively, so Valve determined that Team Fortress 2 would be better served by spending the time and manpower it would spend on creating additional maps on refining and expanding a small, core set of maps instead. The idea is to predict which maps would become the chosen few, and ship with those, then follow up with more content later.

That idea manifests itself in different ways. The iconic Two Fortresses, lovingly abbreviated 2fort, returns as a Capture the Flag map largely unchanged save its extensive visual makeover--it has a high likelihood of going into heavy rotation, simply because its design has already held up so well over the years. "We felt we had to stay close with that one," said Walker. I had a rather surreal moment of sudden deja vu after a few minutes of playing TF2's 2fort, when I realized that this was indeed the same map I had played for countless hours, years earlier. On the other side of the coin, there is Well, which has diverged highly from its CTF-based predecessor and now houses a territory-based gametype.

A much more unconventional way of adding replayability and pacing variety can be seen in Hydro, which makes use of Valve's new dynamic map feature. A territorial map, Hydro consists of two bases situated outside diagonally opposed corners of a roughly square environment. Inside each corner of the square is one control point, and at the beginning of the game each team is randomly assigned two of those control points. In the first round, the game chooses a red team control point and a blue team control point, and locks off the unused points. Once one team--say, red--captures the opposing team's point, it gains control of it and the round ends. The next round begins, and the game randomly chooses one red control point and one blue control point (in this case, blue only has one remaining control point to choose), locks off the other two control points, and the map is now physically different. Different doorways are open and different paths are available in order to structure the map around the two newly chosen points. This process continues until one team has captured all four points; rounds generally take only a few minutes each. With a total of six different configurations, Hydro therefore manages to cram an unusually high degree of replayability into a single map.

Continue reading for stat tracking details and reflections on Team Fortress 2's visual style.