By Pentadact

I know it’s just because it’s early days, but I haven’t hit a single impenetrable Sentry nest, and the alternate routes are deliciously labyrinthine. It feels teeming with nooks and crannies to hide out in, recharge and take an unexpected angle from. And I love having a section of track that runs underneath the main play area. Tim and I skewered the enemy team repeatedly as they tried to escort the cart through that underground tunnel, he as a Sniper from the front, I as a Spy from the back.

I thought at first it was just a superior Spy map, but I played it solely as Heavy for some time today, and it was among the most fun I’ve ever had as that class. In fact, for the first time in ten months, I broke my all-time score record. 36 points from 16 kills as a Spy defending stage 3 of Dustbowl, replaced by 37 points and 16 kills assaulting Badwater Basin as a Heavy with incalculable aid from Doctor Graham Smith. I think we survived the entire round, and were with the cart almost every metre of the way. Cap score grind plus plus.

I know, I know, you’ve got 48 kills as an Engineer and 39 as a Demo - shut up.

Chris sums up a lot of what saddens me about this mode very eloquently at 1Fort - the lows are as low as Sudden Death, but the highs aren’t nearly as high because a two-minute victory doesn’t feel significant.

I’m not yet clear on the precise conditions that cause it to occur, but the system whereby a third of the players must sit out every round is bizarre and disastrous. I’m just not interested in spending my free time that way; impotently watching two teams of strangers blunder awkwardly into one another.

I don’t see why there can’t be two full teams. What is the presumably monumental problem that’s worth paying the exorbitant cost of boring a third of your players to solve?

If you want lower player counts, lower the player counts. If you want to scramble the teams, scramble them whenever one side wins three times in a row. Use the rescrambling to separate the highest scorers, and prefer to keep friends together unless they’re dominating.

With that system, Arena would be worthwhile to me because its format undermines the feasibility of Sentry nests, the biggest drain on my fun with TF2. Without it, I’m just not playing.

Heavy Unlocks
Funny, don’t want ‘em.

I am, of course, reserving judgement on all of them until I actually try them out. The Sandvich is a lovely idea, but the prospect doesn’t entice me particularly. I don’t die because I enter a fight with partial health, I die because I take more than 300 damage before I can retreat.

Likewise, the other unlocks don’t attempt to solve any of the reasons I avoid the Heavy, and don’t add possibilities that excite me on paper. The reason I avoid him is that his slowness and similar weapons make him tactically inflexible: he can only deal with one kind of situation, and he doesn’t have the tools to engineer it. If he encounters something unexpected and undesirable, he has no options. Boxing gloves, a slow-gun and a snack don’t sound like they give me more options, and I thrive on options.

I’ll update this if that impression is mistaken, but I think unlockables need to entice as much as perform, and this is the first time they haven’t done that for me. For others, too - I’ve only seen one Natascha and no boxing gloves, and there are rarely more than four Heavies per team. It’s nothing like the mono-class unlock fever that gripped Pyro and Medic week.

“The goal was to establish a clear difference between the two sides of the map. One side climbs up toward a large mountain peak, and the other dips down into a vast valley.”

Reading that, I pictured a glorious mountain-climb of a map, something Tim is always saying would add some much-needed drama to TF2’s struggles. The reality is a truly lovely place that I long to spend time in, but it looks to me an awful lot like a perfectly symmetrical square of entirely flat land around big square building. I guess he’s talking about the background.

Regardless, like a lot of people I’m in love with this new style and I can’t wait for them to make a map in it that I actually want to play.