TOM FRANCIS
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How I Feel About Team Fortress 2 In Graph Form

Lately, I’ve been playing and enjoying TF2 a bit. There was a time when I wrote about that game so often this site was virtually a fan blog, but it petered out a bit. It’s a combination of the natural drop off in interest in a competitive online game, and a drop off in the interesting differences the new content adds.

The latest update has bucked the trend a bit, but before I get into why, I want to explain what I’m talking about. I often wonder why my play time with TF2 dropped off even as the stuff in it got much better, so I have expressed the relationship in the only way I know how to articulate any feelings: through the medium of graph.

Basically, I wouldn’t normally like a team-based shooter at all by this point in its life cycle, and that can’t help but have an influence. I don’t like competition because I’m too competitive, and I don’t like team games because I don’t like organising people. It’s a miracle I like TF2 at all.

The chunks of new content flying into the game have kept it fresher than it had any right to be, often because it genuinely made the game better, and the rest of the time just because it was new. That appeal ended with the money update: once they added a way to buy new stuff for cash, they no longer provided an easy route to get it for free. It ceased to be “Ooh, new stuff!” and became “Hmm, purchasing options.”

But the last update does have that kick of novelty: it’s a medieval mode where most classes are useless, since their high tech weapons are gone.

Only the sword-and-shield Demoman and the bow-firing Sniper are great, and a few other classes can work if they happen to unlock certain new items, like gloves that make the Heavy tougher against ranged attacks, or a healing crossbow for the Medic. What I like about it is this:

1. It’s very, very different.
2. It’s so new no-one really cares about winning yet.
3. No-one can bitch at me for going Sniper when we already have five Snipers.
4. The only map for it is small, focused, and channels people into a beautifully designed chokepoint for the finale.
5. No sentries.
6. No stickies.

I’m fine with getting skewered by an arrow, fine with having my head cut off, fine with being battered to death by a Heavy’s metal fists. Almost every other way to die in TF2, particularly by automated sentry fire, is just irritating to me. Nothing to do with the skill involved or lack thereof, it just feels annoying.

This mode pares back all of the ways to die instantly to a distant opponent, and so for the first time, my cause of death isn’t always “Walked round a corner, met three enemies”.

How long it’ll stay fun I don’t know, but variety like this is what I want from this game now. I think there’s as much value in taking things out as putting them in.

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