TOM FRANCIS
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Getting Owned

YOU ARE SO SMALL! IS FUNNY TO ME!

To celebrate the release of the decent-but-not-great Meet The Scout short, I’m finally getting round to putting up a story about that class that I wrote ages ago. Well, kind of about the Scout, kind of about the primal psychology of competitive multiplayer gaming. Non-TF2 players: I’m currently writing a post that isn’t about TF2. Then three more that are.

I’d been trying to go cold turkey on Team Fortress 2 for a while, since I’d started to really care about winning and losing. That’s dangerous.

At one point I was coming up on an Engineer who was officially Dominating me, inches from his unguarded back (I was a Spy). He crossed the train tracks, while the “Train Incoming!” alarm was going off.

And I’d got to this mindset where there was just no fucking way I was stopping, there was no fucking way he was getting away from me this time. And so, of course, I was hit in the face by a train and he got away.

When you can’t see the funny side of something like that, you have to worry. I could not. It was about as funny as cancer. So, I decided, no more TF2 – at least until the next update.

But then in the course of researching a really fun piece for our Culture section next issue (now this issue! On sale now! Buy buy buy!), I kept running into Scout tips videos, Scout quotes and Scout ownage clips.

There’s a kind of philosophy to the Scout: there are many situations he simply can’t even begin to tackle, so he has to know his limits and pwn within them. I never got the hang of that – I have a hard time with the idea that I can’t take on the entire enemy team single-handedly in every conceivable circumstance – but I felt I could get it.

So tonight I went Scout. We got owned.

There’s a very particular feeling to getting owned. It’s unique to computer games – it doesn’t feel this way to lose at a sport, or chess. It has to be something violent – and not rugby violent. Gun, knife, fire, blunt force trauma violent.

It’s such a horrible, galling feeling of violation and misery that most gamers have come to refer to it as “getting raped”. I’m actually on a quiet and not very effective campaign to persuade them to stop using that word, because it suggests a pretty disgusting disregard for the weight of its real meaning, but the fact that otherwise sane people use it gives you some idea of how unpleasant the sensation is.

They’re everywhere, they’re in your face, and no matter what you do you get repeatedly and violently humiliated. TF2 rubs it in by proclaiming to everyone when you’re being “DOMINATED” by someone – they’ve killed you four times since you last killed them.

Non-gamers probably wonder why we wouldn’t just stop playing at this point, but that’s the worst thing you can do. If you do that, the feeling lingers, taints everything you do after. The only cure is reciprocation: winning isn’t enough now, however unlikely it may be – you have to own them.

This was proving hard. Scout is my lowest-scoring class – I’ve never once had a really good round with him – and even so I was by far the strongest player on my team. I virtually was my team.

I was responsible for more than half the kills, despite not being a combat class. I was our only defense – all our Engies pessimistically retreated to our last capture point, leaving the ones that were actually in play completely unguarded. And I was solely responsible for every single capture we made: five of them in a row, every time lost as soon as I died.

This is the slightly depressing thing about team-games: sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are, you’re going to lose, hard. Most losing teams finish a game hating each other far more than they hate the enemy. In fact, several attempt to join the other team at the start of the next round.

You can’t shake the illusion, though, that it must be possible to make a difference. It must be possible – just theoretically, not necessarily for me – to be good enough to transcend your team.

It was getting exasperating. I could kill everyone who came for our last cap before they got there, I could re-capture our next control point again and again, but no-one was there to hold it when I inevitably succumbed to their three Soldiers, three Heavies and two Pyros. And even the Engineers weren’t able to stop Scouts from getting to our final capture point when I wasn’t there.

I wasn’t even playing well: in most one-on-ones, I’d lose. The rest of my team were just significantly worse than that. At one point I gave in to the pointless urge to chide them: “Is anyone actually going to do anything about that Sentry?” I asked pointedly, being the only class who truly didn’t stand a chance against it.

“i was going to pretend it wasn’t there” said one.

Eventually I gave up trying to hold out against six stronger offensive classes while all our heavy firepower pussyfooted around in the corridors behind me, neither defending reliably nor daring to attack. I just ran past everything, including the Sentry.

This is a weird experience. Almost no-one can stop you, even if they’re good. And so you pass whole squads of enemies marching out to the front lines, and they all see you, and they all fire, but by the time the Heavies’ barrels have spun up you’re gone, and suddenly you’ve got a lot of people thinking about your psychology.

“What’s he doing?” they’ve got to wonder. “He’s heading for a capture point he can’t take, because his team haven’t got the two before it yet. So do we care? Only if he’s going to curve round and come up behind us. But we can’t wait here forever to see if he does that.”

So most people just carry on, glancing behind them a lot. I expected one to head back to look for me, but none did. So I hung out at their spawn, watching Pyros leave their supply room, waiting until they were far enough away that they couldn’t get back to it quickly, then striking from behind.

I had to abort a lot of these strikes – Scouts don’t have much health and don’t do their damage very quickly – but I stayed alive and caused a lot of confusion, irritation and death.

I ended up in the middle of the map, having just taken out a Soldier and a Heavy’s Medic at no small cost to my health, and I suddenly noticed it was unlocked.

My team! My team had actually done something! They took the capture point directly outside their base without my help! Well, cutting off the enemy reinforcements probably didn’t hurt, but still! One of the kill messages showed that the enemy Sentry in our base was down.

“like i said,” the same guy commented, “it’s not there.”

I had 16 health and a Pyro was coming towards me shotgun blazing, so I had to abort my capture to snatch a medkit. But soon he was dead and it was capped, and I was on my way to the next one.

This time I was heading to a point I could cap, but the stream of enemies pouring out of their base ignored me again: they were that sure they could re-take the middle point. They couldn’t possibly lose the upper hand. They were owning.

I nearly died taking their next one. They already had two people on the middle point to re-take it, but Scouts count double and the middle cap is the slowest to take. An enemy Scout had spotted me and doubled back to make sure I wouldn’t get it. I hid in a very obvious corner of the capture zone, and miraculously it took him a fatal second to figure out which one, during which I nailed him.

Suddenly we had four of the map’s five points, and I knew the last one would be unguarded. Only losers set up defenses on the last cap before it’s in play – that’s us, not them.

I immediately ran into a Heavy coming from their base, hastily doubled back and took the other route in before he could fire. This time he probably didn’t have to think long about my psychology: he knew I was going for their final point, he knew it was undefended, and he knew there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He was the strongest class and I was the weakest, his team were winning and my team were losing; but he was slowest class and I was the fastest, and he was already heading the wrong way. I know exactly what that feels like. It feels like getting owned.

There’s a glass wall between the final capture point and the supply room that respawning players come out of to defend it. So I saw them: a Pyro, a Heavy, the Engineer who was dominating me, all pour out of that gate just as I was coming up to the capture point. I had 28 health.

I put my gun away, jumped onto the cap, and hit the taunt key: the key that leaves you unable to attack, fixed to the spot and helpless for the next few seconds, all for the sake of spreading your arms, surveying all before you and nodding cockily, baseball bat in hand.

My mental calculation was right: they could easily reach me before my taunt finished, but not before I captured the point. And since it was the last point, that meant winning the game. Which renders all enemies unable to attack, and triples the damage of your every blow.

It was obscene. The match was won just as three guys closed in on me, and I already had my steel baseball bat in hand. None of my team-mates were around, of course, so the spoils were all mine. Critical hits don’t just do triple damage, they make a cracking, booming sound like lightning, and when they kill they send the victim flying.

I pounded my way through their entire team, smashing each of their faces in with a furious series of thunderous bangs, ending, at last, with a Dominating Engineer. TF2 has two little jingles: one for getting Dominated, one for getting Revenge. The latter has never sounded so good.

I had to be in a bad mood to truly enjoy this – if it had all been harmless fun, I couldn’t have relished being so cruel. I had to still be stuck in the grimly competitive mindset that made me want to stop playing TF2, I had to spend the first half of the match having a thoroughly miserable time, and I had to have useless – or near-useless – team-mates.

I probably made twelve people feel really, really annoyed about that match – they lost to a cheap, nasty tactic, to one man on a team they could easily beat, and then they got smacked repeatedly in the face by a magic baseball bat while completely defenceless. And this game has made me enough of a dick to find that really, really satisfying.

Der Uberdoktor

Medic Unlockables announced! Discussed! Condemned? Perhaps!

Incredibly Important Update: The second unlockable weapon for the Medic is called the KritzKrieg, not the Critzcrieg as it’s spelt in the screenshots and, like, every website ever. See the end of this post.

Chris Livingston‘s been inadvertantly sappin’ my TF2 posts from this blog, by posting interesting stuff about the game regularly enough on his own that I invariably end up composing a 500 word comment over there and then feel like I’ve said my piece.

Chris’s blog’s ad banner: too awesome not to use.

But there’s lots to say about the latest torrent of news. The first batch of unlockable items have finally been detailed in full, and those long-leaked Achievements you’ll need to earn to get them are now concrete and specific. If you already know all the juicy details, skip the next three paragraphs – I’m just going to run through them quickly.

About a third of the achievements are easy: they’re things we’ve all done if we’ve played Medic for any length of time, like building an Ubercharge before the gates open during the Setup time. And after achieving a third of them, you’ll be able to switch out your regular Syringe Gun for the Blutsauger – a Syringe Gun that drinks enemy blood to give you 3 health for each hit, but which never scores critical hits.

A further third of the achievements are tough, but worthwhile pursuits. I don’t think I’ve ever used my Ubercharge at the same time as two other Medics, and I probably never will accumulate ten million healing points. Once you have done two thirds of the achievements, though, you get the KritzKrieg: a healing ray that whose Ubercharge gives the patient 100% critical hits instead of invulnerability.

The other third of the achievements are silly things, jokes – some sound like they were made up specifically to fit the name. Consultation, for example, is the award for healing another Medic while he kills five enemies in a single life. There’s one for building up an Ubercharge and not using it, instead attacking the enemies and managing to kill five of them without dying. When you rack up all the Medic-specific acheivements, you can has the Ubersaw: a Bonesaw that gives you 25% Ubercharge every time you hit, but hits 20% slower.

So, there are a lot of awesome ideas in there, but also a lot of obvious concerns. Like:

Once you’ve got the Ubersaw, why would you bother healing chumps anymore?

This doesn’t worry me much. To get the Ubersaw, you need all the achievements. One of them is to heal 10,000,000 health. Others are so hard that you’ll probably end up doing that just in the course of trying to get them. Valve reckon the ten-mill-heal alone is three months of playing nothing but medic, doing nothing but healing. My point is that if you’ve got all these, a) you’ve earned the right to take a break from healing, b) you probably understand the fundamentals of the class by now, and realise that injured people sure appreciate a bit of beam love, and c) I’m just guessing, I don’t know you, but I’m thinking you like healing.

If one Medic Ubers someone, and another Kritzes them, don’t they become an unstoppable killing machine?

I don’t see it. It’s not like when an Uber comes in, currently we all just stand there thinking “Eh, he’s not critting, I’ll probably survive.” We run. An Uber already is an unstoppable lethal force. I don’t know about you, but when my Uber wears off, the only people left alive are the ones I couldn’t get to. To me, Ubers are mainly for breaking otherwise impenetrable nests of Sentries, and crits do exactly the same damage as normal shots against Engy kit. If you’ve got an Uber and a Kritz ready to go, the strategy I’m scared of is sending in an Ubered Heavy with a Kritzed Soldier pumping in fire support.

Doesn’t tying practical benefits to achievements encourage – almost mandate – the worst kind of achievement whoring?

Yeah, but where the achievements are good, that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if a dozen people pile on a private server somewhere and try and game the system instead of playing properly. That’s never going to be the mainstream, and so long as your achievements are for things that class should be doing, the net effect is going to be a bunch of people doing what they should be doing.

Should you really be incentivising bad tactics like Ubering a Scout?

This is a problem. I’m not a fan of panning a change before it goes live, but in this case not much prediction is needed. I want the KritzKrieg, I’m going to be Ubering Scouts. I’m going to be asking friends to go Heavy and punch people while I Uber, instead of actually doing something useful for our team. I’m going to set up a tit-for-tat with another Medic so we can both get our Consultation on instead of tending to the dying around us. I’m guessing a lot of other people will too, but I don’t have to rely on that prediction – this system bribes me to screw it up for my team. Most of these things sound like fun, but that’s probably no consolation to the eleven people who just lost because of me.

I could write whole essays on the genius of TF2’s lighting. I won’t.

The only mitigating factor is that, since one class is getting three new weapons and thirty-six achievements while the others remain unchanged, we’re going to have enough Medics on each team for the first time ever. So losing a few to stupid japes half the time isn’t always going to be crippling. It’s just going to be, you know, stupid.

Unlocks aren’t always going to be tied to achievements, but to me that’s not really the problem. Achievements are fine, but the silly ones shouldn’t be compulsory – they shouldn’t even be incentivised. Call them something else, or hide them from the interface so people don’t know to try them, but get recognition if they stumble upon the idea themselves. Just make the useful, informative, beneficial majority of the achievements the only ones that count toward the useful, desirable, beneficial unlocks.

Still, I’m not half as anxious about this now that the Overhealer‘s out. I’m actually not going to play Medic for long after the update – I want to exploit the inevitable glut of doc-jockeys to a) get some serious Heavy on while the healin’s good – he’s one of my favourite classes but for some reason among my least-played, and the least played among all TF2 players. b) get some serious dressing-up-as-a-Heavy on while the healin’s stupid. I’m assuming the many, many healing-related achievements will outweigh the few Spy-killing ones to manufacture a net gullibility boon that I can exploit for maximum backstabbery. Which brings me to c) be standing right behind them, knife glinting, when they finally activate their first KritzKrieg. I don’t need an unlock to crit, nurse.

P.S. Does anyone know enough German to figure out why they’re spelling it ‘Critzcrieg’ when it’s presumably a pun on ‘Blitzkrieg’? Is there some convention I’m missing? Critzkrieg looks so right.

Incredibly Important Update: After two actual Germans testified in the comments that this spelling made no sense, I could bear the confusion and mental anguish no longer, and e-mailed Robin. He writes back to say that there was a miscommunication with the guy putting together the info that got given to these sites, and the real name is in fact The KritzKrieg.

That precise spelling and capitalisation is pulled directly from the game’s source code a mere 17 minutes ago, so it’s pretty much gospel – and at least 300% righter than everyone else on the internet. This post has been changed. The world has been changed.

The Life And Inevitable Death Of Bloopi

Every year I fall for one April Fool, usually on April the 2nd because the internet has undermined the transience and therefore the entire freaking point of the day. This year it was this awesome hoax by Braid artist and A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible hero David Hellman.

Curse you, David Hellman! Your pictures were so alluring that I skipped the highly suspicious intro paragraph and totally sent the link to Tim before I realised it was a big pile of fat blue lies!

Check also out what happened in Guild Wars, if you missed it in my Flickr box down there on the right.

PC Gamer Blog: Five Years Of Foolishness

I celebrated April Fool’s day over at the PC Gamer blog by recounting five of my favourite games industry pranks of the last decade.

Anne Diamond Reviews Games

What the hell is going on with that photo? Did somebody hit her with a copy of Dead Rising so hard that it stuck five inches into the flesh of her shoulder? Is some previously unnoticed fold of unctuous fat obscuring the tops of the rest of those game boxes? (Via Craig)

Review: Soulstorm (Fire Indeed Hot)

Soulstorm’s developers, Iron Lore, have shut down since they made this game. Which seems ridiculous, given the spectacular number of copies it’s going to sell.

It’s also sad, because while this wasn’t as brave or interesting as Dark Crusade, Iron Lore were talented guys who had a rare gift: they could see what made another game great, and mimic it.

Even if that wasn’t their intention, they were one of the only developers who gave the impression that they truly knew the nuts and bolts of what made games fun. I had plenty of complaints about Soulstorm, but for weeks I couldn’t stop playing it.

Now I’ve moved on to their previous game, Titan Quest, and it’s far better than I’d been led to believe. It’s convinced me that we really have lost a great team in Iron Lore, and if you’re interested in an insider’s perspective on why, and how, a THQ guy has posted his thoughts over at Quarter to Three.

The Far Cry 2 Team

I guess I knew devs teams were this big these days, but still: wow. Next time I pan a major game, I’m going to imagine that many people simultaneously bursting into tears. I’ll still to do it, I’m just going to feel bad.

Valve Decided Against The Overhealer

Damn, I was in the middle of composing an eloquent post that phrased with restraint and reason why I found it hard to imagine this having a positive net effect on the game. Now it’s not going to look like I’m prescient.

Preview: World of Goo

I’m so freaking excited about World of Goo. The preview build 2D Boy sent us – despite being fundamentally a silly building game – left me breathless. It has this sublime, uplifting, wonderful conclusion. And it’s just the first chapter.

The main reason it excites me is something you’d never guess from Tower of Goo, its experimental predecessor. It’s the levels – each is a unique idea, a unique place, and a unique mechanic. In the one pictured above, you’re building downwards to reach albino goos in a dark cave, to wake them from their eternal sleep and bring them to safety.

The last games to do levels so well were Darwinia and Psychonauts – which I guess doesn’t put Goo in best-selling company. But the fact that it’s coming to Wii ought to help with that. And you. You ought to help with that.

Basically, in my preview, I ask you to buy it. You’re not really supposed to do that in previews. There’s no demo yet, and as I say Tower of Goo really suggests nothing of its genius. But if you do pre-order, you get the same first chapter I played right now – plus a, er, ‘Profanity Pack’. That’s it, that’s all I got. It’s beautiful, and fun, and it’s going to be one of the highlights of this year.

I probably shouldn’t go into marketing.

Update: Comments disabled for a bit, due to a weird spate of inept spammers who don’t even link or mention the site they’re spamming for.

‘Meet The Scout’ Imminent

It was shown at GDC. If you’re as geeky as me, don’t click this link unless you demand proof – it’s mildly spoiling. The Scout’s been my favourite personality ever since the “I broke your stupid crap, moron” incident, so I can’t freakin’ wait.

Update: it’s probably going to be the week of the 10th, or the week after that. Valve Time, naturally.

PC Gamer Blog: Greatest Videogame Weapon of All Time

Just posted this today, via the ever-brilliant Waxy.org. On my life, I haven’t laughed so long or so hard at anything since the original lolrus, and I can’t stress enough what I say in the post: this is exponentially funnier the louder you play it.

Vortessence Hangover

Searching for something else entirely on Flickr threw this up.

Audiosurfing The Shipping News

The B rides the least exciting soundscapes he can find, including our own PCG podcast and Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation.

Team Fortress 2 Badlands Exploit Patched

“Fixed Badlands exploits.” Ha! There go all your kills, exploit-o-jerks! “Fixed a case where a spy stabbing from the front of a player would score a backstab.” Aw. There go all my kills.

Badlands

Playing Team Fortress 2 at the moment is starting to feel like being part of something. We play it in the office at lunch. Chris Livingston’s making a comic in it. We settle our grudges against the US edition of PC Gamer with it. Yahtzee’s making bad Garry’s Mod machinima in it. The other day a level designer at Ubisoft Montreal mailed me an incredible map of a film set he’d made for it. And when the update adding Badlands, the first proper new map, was due to go live, everyone hung out at the Steam forums making tenuous “X sappin’ mah Y” jokes until it was released.

Badlands is good. I can’t help thinking it would have made more sense to go with this instead of Granary for the initial release, given how similar Granary and Well are. Granary’s become problematic on public servers because so few people are willing to play defense, and the straightforward layout makes it incredibly easy to win quickly once the middle capture point is yours. Badlands staves off rush-wins like this by making the second-to-last cap a) time-consuming to get to and b) easy to defend.

Which is good. So far it’s lead to a lot more back-and-forth than either Granary or Well had, and those are my favourite matches. Even if we win, I hate a trouncing. But like all symmetrical control-point maps, the final point is so wide-open and absurdly fast to capture that it might as well not exist.

I assume that if you make the final point tactically biased towards defenders, you get a lot of stalemates. But I don’t see why you can’t make it slow to capture shortly after the second-to-last point falls, then become gradually less resistant to capture the longer the pushing team manage to hold the defenders back to their last point. Stalemates would be just as unlikely, but rush-wins would become much trickier.

I think the reason this type of map gets a lot of flak on the forums, while Dustbowl and Gravelpit seem generally well-liked, is that defeat has long felt inevitable by the time it comes. On Dustbowl, you always feel like you can hold it for that much longer. You always feel like you can cap it in the time you have left. Victory is as close to your grasp as defeat.

On symmetrical capture-point maps, I’m always in a “Oh fuck it, we’ve lost this” mindset long before we actually do. Comebacks aren’t impossible, but they’re both daunting and improbable. When defeat is close, victory is way, way over there. If we’ve sucked this hard so far, what chance to we have of making it now?

The good news is that Goldrush, the map that’ll introduce the new Payload game mode soon, falls firmly in the former category. In fact, it makes that knife-edge between a win and a loss all the more tangible, because you can see how close that damn cart is to the objective. That’s one less level of abstraction than looking at a coloured icon or countdown clock.

And more importantly, the gradual roll-out of unlockable items for every class is going to make the game even more like being part of something. The simultaneous worldwide release of exciting stuff is one of the great pleasures of Steam, a shared moment that fuses the community together. And here’s a way for them to be doing that regularly, for years.

I apologise, but only a little, for talking about Team Fortress 2 so much. If you’re a gamer, I can only say that it’s like when Deus Ex had just come out. If you’re not, it’s like being a film buff at the time of The Godfather. But it’s not really like either, and that’s kind of the point.