This Just In: The Scout Is A Dick

 

As a Spy, there’s a very tense moment after you’ve ’sapped’ an enemy Engineer’s sentry, dispenser and teleporters. You retain your perfect disguise, but the Engineer knows there’s a Spy around. It’s not always possible to get far from the scene of the crime before the Engineer comes running, so sometimes you have to rely on a good choice of disguise and some subtle sidling to defer suspicion onto an innocent target.

Dressed as a Scout, I had the best possible chance of getting away with it – Spies rarely disguise as Scouts because they can’t move as fast as a real one, so it looks suspicious if you move around a lot. But I was staying perfectly still, facing the other way, waiting with impressive restraint for the sappers to finish their work, the sentry to kersplode and the crime to be complete.

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Sometimes, your character utters a line appropriate to what he’s done. “You’ve got blood on my suit,” if you’ve just revealed yourself and backstabbed someone, for example. Other characters have special lines for if they manage to destroy an Engineer’s structures. The Spy doesn’t have these, of course, because it would of course blow his cover to talk like a Spy amongst enemies.

But Valve may have overlooked, or intentionally ignored, a quirk of the Spy’s deception – he will perfectly mimic his assumed class’s vocal responses. After a pregnant pause as my Sappers fizzled quietly away and the Engineer ran in front of me, glaring wildly for any signs of suspicion, his Sentry finally exploded. And my Spy, in a perfect impression of an asshole Scout, immediately shouted, “I broke your stupid crap, moron!”

Three things happened at once – I slapped my forehead, the Engineer blew me away with a point-blank blast, and the Scout became my favourite personality – narrowly beating the Kenny-esque Pyro.

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bob_Arctor: Gah, bought the bloody Orange box and can't play it with wireless internet, keeps dropping out.
So I just have to read about TF2. ARRGG.

Jason L: Just curious - did they ever fix this? Do they consider it a problem? Do they know about it?

 
Pentadact: It hasn't been mentioned in the update news, and it's a rare enough occurence that I can't tell if it's gone. I hope they haven't - it's pure comedy.

Chet - who writes a lot of this dialogue - says that they originally toyed with having the Spy do feeble impressions of whoever he was dressed up as. If you yank out the game files, you can hear a few aborted attempts at him doing a very shakey Engineer. It's a wonderful idea, but you can kind of see why they didn't follow through.
 

Matt: How do we find these sound files?

Freakinswiit: You need to look through the GCF files by using a program called GCFScape.

BloodVex: Doesn't he say "everyone back to the base, pardner?" in-game or is that one of those locked away GCF files.

I can swear I've heard it in game befor

 
 

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