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March 9, 2010 - TF2 Team
Yesterday, we announced that Steam and all our Source engine games will be coming to the Mac. Sound too good to be true? Well, guess what: It is true! There are no catches! Sometimes life actually works like that. The bad news is that we've just truth bombed your hard-earned lie detector back to the stone age, and you'll probably lose all your money to the next international lottery scam that sneaks through your spam filter. Still, Steam on the Mac!
Since we're getting a lot of email asking the same basic questions, we figured we'd just answer them here:
Q: I own TF2 on the PC. Do I have to buy it again on the Mac?
A: No. If you own TF2 on the PC, you own TF2 on the Mac (and vice versa). You don't have to buy the game twice. In addition, the Steam Cloud will automatically propagate your configuration settings and custom sprays to your Mac for you.
Q: Is it just some crappy emulated version of TF2?
A: No! Also: How dare you! Mac users aren't getting a crappy emulated version of the game. TF2 will run natively on OSX, like an actual big boy game for adults.
Q: Hmm, that all sounds pretty good. But I'll bet I can't play with my friends who own Macs if I'm on my PC.
A: Mac and PC users will all play together, on the same servers. We're not creating two separate universes. We're all going to be one big, happy family with guns locked in a bloody, never-ending struggle for cap points.
March 2, 2010 - Brandon Reinhart
We're plugging away at the Engineer update. He's an interesting class to work on, because he creates a larger footprint in the game than any other class. This means we have a lot of options to work with, and the resulting set of ideas is truly daunting. Since we've already built and playtested some things that haven't worked out (with no false modesty, I think we've mastered the art of rapidly making things that aren't fun), we thought it might be interesting to give you some of our failed experiments.
The first was a new building internally known as the Repair Node. We gave Engineers the ability to replace any current building (teleporter entrances and exits were considered one building for this) with the Repair Node instead.
While deployed, the Repair Node would draw from a pool of energy to fix damage to nearby buildings. When the node ran out of energy, it would stop repairing and regenerate up to full, creating a window of opportunity for the attackers. When sapped, the Repair Node's repair function was disabled for the duration of the sap.
The goal of the Repair Node was to solve a perceived problem in the Engineer's play experience: always having to be tied to your base. The Engineer often has little to do after his base is built and fully upgraded except wait for the inevitable Spy sapper attempt, or for the battlefront to reach the base. The Repair Node was meant to buy the Engineer time if he wanted to range out to gather metal or harass the enemy with his shotgun.
This is usually how we approach our game design: Identify a problem, then discuss the ways it could be solved. Our experience told us that even when the Engineer didn't feel immediate pressure, he still couldn't range out away from his base. If a Spy, Soldier, or Demoman found the base unguarded, it didn't take long to blow up. The further away an Engineer was, the fewer buildings he would be able to save from sapping. We also felt that the Engineer invested a lot of up-front work to establish bases that were very easily destroyed. Thus the repair node was born.
Play-testing the Repair Node showed us one expected, and two (somewhat) unexpected, outcomes. The expected outcome was that bases were far harder to destroy, and turtling became a super effective strategy. Fortunately, this is the kind of problem that can be attacked by turning the correct game design knob, and the Repair Node had a lot of available knobs. We could lower the rate of repair, lower the amount of repair energy, lengthen the vulnerable period, and so forth. We tried several options. One change we made was to add diminishing returns so that two Repair Nodes working together were less than perfectly efficient, and adding a third didn't really help at all.
Despite the design choices we had available, we were never really able to get the Repair Node to feel balanced for the attacking team. TF2 maps tend to be designed with very specific predicted Sentry placement locations and length of Sentry survivability. The Repair Node distorted old favorite maps and made testing new ones more difficult by exaggerating intentional choke points and creating new choke points where they didn't previously exist.
The first unexpected outcome of the Repair Node was the team realizing just how valuable the Dispenser and Teleporter were to so many aspects of game pacing. If the Engineer isn't able to build a Dispenser, his team loses the support power that the Dispenser provides. In most games Dispensers are ubiquitous. You don't really realize what you've lost until you've lost it. Fewer Dispensers had the effect of slowing attacking teams down in a variety of ways: Teams were more fragile, metal was harder to get to the front lines, and team rally points were harder to define.
An Engineer who took a Repair Node instead of a Teleporter put his team in an even less viable position. The pacing of many maps became completely broken without Teleporters in play. Teams weren't able to push as effectively and the lines of battle moved closer to the spawn points. This lack of flexibility meant that attackers weren't able to hold gains and matches took longer to complete.
The second unexpected outcome was downstream from the first. Teams perceived Engineers with Repair Nodes as less "friendly", specifically because they weren't building Dispensers or Teleporters. In retrospect, older data at our disposal should have known this would happen. Prior to TF2's release, the Medic had weaponry that was significantly more powerful, leading to highly skilled players playing Medic as a purely combat class. Aside from the balance issues this created, it also resulted in a Medic that wasn't interested in healing anyone, which didn't typically sit well with his teammates. Their perception was that healing is the Medic's job. Medics who didn't do that weren't perceived to be team players -- an identical reaction to Engineers refusing to build Dispensers and/or Teleporters. Like many design exercises we didn't learn what to do next so much as what NOT to do.
- Lesson 1: The problem of the Engineer being tied to his base still exists, but the Repair Node was too heavy-handed a solution. If we solve this problem in the future, it will have to be in a way that doesn't distort the existing balance between attackers and defensive choke points.
- Lesson 2: The Dispenser and Teleporter are really good. We already knew this, but we didn't know that they were really, really good. Encouraging Engineers to either avoid building them entirely, or to build them in weird ways, broke the game's pacing immediately. New buildings in the Engineer update will probably take the form of upgrades, or entirely new choices alongside the old buildings, instead of replacements.
These may seem like obvious lessons, but knowing for certain why a particular idea doesn't work can often be as valuable as an idea that does. This process highlighted specifically where and why the Engineer is valuable, and how even slightly altering this value can have game-shattering implications.
Ultimately, the Repair Node was cut because it made the game more of a grind. While it definitely made it less stressful to manage a base as an Engineer, it wasn't fun. The Engineer gained a little bit of fun, but nearly everyone else in the match suffered as a result.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In other news, our minds were blown this week when we saw Andrew Kepple's amazing Spy & Pyro cartoon. We've decided this is final proof that TF2 fans are smarter, more creative, and much better looking than fans of all other video games. On the competitive side, we've been addicted to watching CommunityFortress's eXtv series of commentated competitive TF2 matches. If you haven't watched any, take a look at some great European and North American matches. If you haven't watched much competitive play, eXtv's commentary does a great job of helping you understand the tactics being employed.
February 2, 2010 - TF2 Team
As the Administrator mentioned last week, we've sorted through the 11,000 submissions to the Propaganda contest and picked some of our favorites from the frankly jaw-dropping number of first-rate entries. Scroll and enjoy! (Oh, and to the runner-up winners below: Keep an eye peeled for an email from us so you can claim a little something for all your hard work.)
Most Unique Likenesses of Soldier and/or Demo
 |
 |
| - Draw | - Brown |
Best Use of a Term We Don't Know the Meaning of,
But That is Probably Filthy
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| - Matthias Rigling |
Best Incorporation of Another Class
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| - Reese |
Most Likely to Get Us a Cease and Desist Order From Bethesda
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| - LARATRON |
Best Use of the Time-worn Maxim "Sex Sells"
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| - Agent Melon |
Best Attempts to Make Soldier Look Adorable
 |
 |
| - Delicious Spyger | - Anneka |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Heroic
 |
| - metalpiss |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Jet-Propelled
 |
| - B0nd07 |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Manly
 |
| - Commissar K |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Normal
 |
| - Brooke |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Melting
 |
| - Nick Pearce |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Cowardly
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| - huzzah! |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Like a Drunk
 |
| - The Fox Fanfare |
Best Attempts to Make Demoman Look Evil
 |
 |
| - Chanicle Bullie | - Daimao |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Like a Kamikaze Pilot
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| - ?Faction |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Like Billy Dee Williams
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| - The Wenny C's Pride |
Best Alternate Entry by a Contest Winner
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| - J.Axer |
Best Ironic Resuscitation of a Long-dead Genre
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| - Prototype |
Best Use of Euclidean Space
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| - Hollohill |
Best Attempt at Iconography
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| - Viva La Demo! |
Best Poster to Take Into a Tattoo Parlor While Pointing at Your Chest
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| - BAO |
Most Convincing Argument for Evolution
 |
| - Rawr/TankTaur |
Most Convincing Argument for Education
 |
| - Plank |
Most Convincing Argument for Learning How to Contract by One Pixel in Photoshop
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| - Cliff Hanger |
Best Poster Evidently Scanned From a 14-Year-Old's Binder
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| - Ryan "Danger" Ohlemeier |
Best Attempt to Raise Awareness About the Dangers of Alcohol
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| - Christian Grund |
Best Attempt to Raise Awareness About Sticky Bomb Tragedies
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| - Esk |
Best Use of Eye Patches
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| - Christian Kaiser |
Best Reference to Conan the Barbarian
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| - UnidColor |
Honorable Mentions in Catchphrase Creation
 |
 |
 |
 |
| - rEJ | - Wofiel | - Shenanigans | - nik. |
Honorable Mentions in Catchphrase Borrowing
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| - kris aubuchon (awesomerobot) |
Best Use of Garry's Mod
 |
| - Eric Salama |
Best Reference to William Wallace
 |
| - Alan Longstaff |
Best Reference to Uncle Sam
 |
| - Dan Tyler |
Best Reference to Loch Ness Monster
 |
| - Wade "Nineaxis" Fabry |
Best Literal Depiction of Larvae
 |
| - Christopher Martinez |
Most Inevitable Incorporation of Urine
 |
| - Christian |
Best Use of Sticky Bombs
 |
| - Michael A. Szymanski |
Best Use of Gratuitous Violence
 |
| - Kyattsuai |
Poster that Made Us the Most Hungry
 |
| - Swankery |
Poster that Made Us the Least Hungry
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| - Yoplatz |
Best Weapon-Centric Posters
 |
 |
| - Saturnian | - Ben Holland |
Best Attempts at Authentic WWII-Era Propaganda
 |
 |
 |
 |
| - CaptainCube | - AGENT MELON | - KILOMONSTER | - THE KAMINATOR |
Best Attempt to Write Soldier Dialogue
 |
| - Eastman's Cranium |
Most Incorrect Statement
 |
| - BLOB |
Best Use of the Most Primitive Computer Art Program Available
 |
| - Zachary Lindemann |
Most Disturbing Use of the Most Primitive Computer Art Program Available
 |
| - Johan |
January 28, 2010 - The Administrator
Firstly, as should come as no surprise to anyone, it is my sad duty to reprimand the various con artists and charlatans in our community who insist on making a mockery of the hard work of others by cheating to win. The following is a list of the top twenty kill counts of the recent Demo/Soldier competition:
Continued...
January 25, 2010 - TF2 Team
In the latest update, we've finally fixed the Double Crouch Jump bug—a longstanding issue involving Scout not being able to double crouch jump without looking like his legs are made of raw bacon strips held up in a wind tunnel:
Continued...
January 13, 2010 - TF2 Team
Today we're unveiling the TF2 Contribution site. This nifty site will allow anyone who's made a custom piece of TF2 content to submit it to us, with a view to it appearing in-game. Many of you have been building fantastic TF2 work for a while now, and we wanted a way for you to get it in front of all TF2 players, and for everyone to see that you were the one that built it.
Continued...
December 21, 2009 - Mike Booth
With the success of the AI systems of Left 4 Dead, we've been continuing to develop these technologies to create new kinds of game experiences. Team Fortress 2 is an excellent "sandbox" for explorations of this sort, and we've been quietly doing so for much of this last year. Some of the results of these explorations are TF "bots" — AI-driven player proxies with simulated humanlike senses, reaction times, and tactics. Although the TFBots are not yet complete, they play a pretty decent game of King of the Hill.
We thought you might enjoy testing your skill against these work-in-progress digital killing machines.
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December 21, 2009 - TF2 Team
We've got one more update to go out to our backend item system. After that, we'll be granting all the missing items that weren't granted properly when you finished achievements.
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December 17, 2009 - TF2 Team
...the Soldier!
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December 17, 2009 - Robin Walker
Victory on the Internet Day has been declared! The war is over! Who won? We don't know! Yet!
Luckily, I, Robin Walker, was up all night building a kill-calculating machine for just such an eventuality. We turned it on, the building filled with smoke, and right now a fireman is yelling at me to leave the building with everyone else. I'll leave when they pry this tiny netbook out of my cold dead hands. Or when an angry fireman fireman-carries me out of the office, which is what is happening right now. Anyway, once all the firemen calm down, we'll announce the War results with today's huge update. To pass the time, go get yourself a fresh mouse and start reloading this page as fast as you possibly can.
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December 17, 2009 - Robin Walker
You heard right As of noon PST today, the Demoman/Soldier WAR! is over. The score is, as of this writing:
Demoman Killed: 6,323,921
Dead Soldiers: 6,298,465
It all comes down to this. I'd give you a motivational speech right now, but the time you wasted reading it would be less time you spent making a difference on the battlefield. Go ahead and break the bad news to your grandfather: YOU are officially now the greatest generation.
Continued...
December 16, 2009 - Robin Walker
Adding in the points awarded to our recent Propaganda Contest winners—60,000 frags added to the Killed Demomen score and 25,000 added to the Killed Soldier score—the war currently stands neck-and-neck at 5,727,928 Killed Soldiers to 5,742,720 Killed Demos. We need to stress to you that we have not gamed these numbers in any way: After a solid week of gut-grinding combat and an astonishing 11,470,648 total kills, the Demomen and Soldiers are separated by a mere 14,792 points.
Continued...
December 16, 2009 - TF2 Team
December 15, 2009 - Robin Walker
Soldiers continue to hold the lead in the war—but like an M&M lodged up their collective noses, the Demoman refuses to melt away quietly. In other M&M-Stuck-Up-Drew-Wolf's-Nose metaphor news, the Soldier's lead remains thin as a candy coating. In fact, judging from our most recent numbers (4923531 Soldiers killed to 5056134 Demomen killed), the Demo actually seems to be closing the gap as the War hurtles to a close.
Continued...
December 14, 2009 - Robin Walker
If there is a tragedy in war (besides all the killing), it is that there must be a loser. Currently, we all know who that loser is.
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December 12, 2009 - Robin Walker
The Soldier/Demo war has generated more email than any event in Team Fortress history. The number one question I'm being asked is "are you going to publish any new information over the weekend?" Absolutely we are. In fact, here's some news right now: As of THIS MOMENT, there is still an M&M lodged up TF artist Drew Wolf's nose. Drew's in the hospital, and the entire team's thoughts and prayers go out to that brave little peanut M&M. Well, have a great weekend everyone!
Continued...
December 11, 2009 - Robin Walker
A day later, the war rages on—the kill tally is, quite literally, in the millions, and the forums are alive with the sounds of people having good, friendly fun while hurling bitter, teary-eyed recrimination at one another.
Continued...
December 11, 2009 - Saxton Hale
In the sixteen hours since war was declared between the Demoman and the Soldier, a whopping 2,681,005 kills (and counting) have been tallied. That's bloody astonishing! And it's all thanks to you! You should all be proud of yourselves!
Continued...
December 10, 2009 - Robin Walker
So: how is the War update different from our other class updates?
In many ways, it's not. Like any other class update, the War update will reveal three new weapons each for the Demoman and Soldier throughout the week, as well as some maps, achievements, and surprises, right up until the day of release, when everything we've been teasing goes live.
Continued...
December 9, 2009 - The Administrator
Friendship ends in one day.
Continued...
November 18, 2009 - TF2 Team
TF2maps.net's Payload Race & A/D CTF Contest
What happens when you give some TF2 mappers six months to make a map? What happens if that map is payload race or a resurrected Team Fortress Classic game mode, Attack/Defend CTF? TF2maps.net decided to find out. Take 'em for a spin and place your votes!
Continued...
November 2, 2009 - TF2 Team
Those of you who pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 (PC)on Steam or at participating retailers now have exclusive access to the momentous event they said would never happen. For the first time in history, two separate Valve universes collide. That's right: it's a Left 4 Dead/Team Fortress crossover! This is not fan fiction! This is not a dream sequence! The characters from Team Fortress 2 will team-up with Bill's hat from Left 4 Dead 1!
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October 30, 2009 - TF2 Team
The good news is that yesterday's $2.50 sale saved the company. The bad news for our bean counters is that, as a "thank you" from all of us on the TF team, we're rolling back prices like it's Thursday. That's right — Team Fortress 2 is BACK ON SALE at its original, company-busting Thursday Super Sale of the Century price of just $2.49! But only until 1:00pm PDT! And this is the last time we're doing this! There will be no more sales!
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October 30, 2009 - TF2 Team
Remember yesterday when Team Fortress 2 was on sale for the ridiculous, mathematically-basically-zero price of $2.49? According to the bean counters, we're now broke. Man, what were we thinking? Anyway, in a desperate attempt to move some units, make up the shortfall, and save the company, TEAM FORTRESS 2 IS ON SALE FOR $2.50 UNTIL 7PM PDT! Pennies from Heaven!
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October 29, 2009 - The Soldier
The Powers That Be have instructed me to pen another dispatch for you unfortunates. How many goddamn words do you people need? In my day you wrote just enough words to convey meaning: "Secure that damn hill." "I will have more sausages." "This man spoke trash and I strangled him." Today's writing is complicated and has to mean two things at the same time, or it won't win writing awards. Double intendreys. Metafores. If I meet the Billy Shakespeare who came up with that nancy-assed garbage, I will bury my war-foot so far up his ass it will be a foot and a half up his ass.
Continued...
October 29, 2009 - Robin Walker
From now until 2:00pm PDT, Team Fortress will be available on Steam for the horrifyingly (to our accountants) low price of $2.49! What else can you buy for that price? That's not a rhetorical question, we're interested in all the things we can buy once those $2.49s start rolling in.
Robin "Twofortyninenaire" Walker
Get Team Fortress 2 for yourself or treat a friend.
Continued...
October 29, 2009 - The Soldier
At ease, you wastes of skin. The Powers That Be have commanded me to write another short missive—I'm told it will be broadcast on some manner of punch-card tube machine and read by the thin, stupid youth of today, who evidently ignored my past instructions to stop wasting their lives and do more push-ups.
Continued...
October 21, 2009 - Wade Schin
With work on Left 4 Dead 2 calming down for us a bit, we were able to finish up something we promised you a while back—gathering up all the source files for the character models and getting them online. This'll hopefully let you guys get a lot more creative out there with your fan-made content. (We can't wait to see it.)
Continued...
September 21, 2009 - Saxton Hale
Patent Pending:
#1308 - "GUARD DOG"
Continued...
September 16, 2009 - Robin Walker
As with the first Left 4 Dead game, most of the TF2 team has moved over to help out Left 4 Dead 2 get through its final shipping steps. This time around, though, we've improved our process a little to ensure we can keep some people on TF2, enabling us to continue doing TF2 updates. We've been a bit slow on updating here, and there's plenty of stuff to talk about, so we might as well jump right in.
Continued...
September 2, 2009 - Erik Johnson
Over the next few days we'll be removing all TF2 items that were earned using external idling applications. We're going to adopt a zero tolerance policy for external applications used to manipulate the persistent item system. Due to us not having a policy in place prior to today, this time we're only removing the items earned through cheating the system. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items. If you're interested, only about 4.5% of the players in TF2's community will be affected by this cleansing process. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items.
Continued...
August 21, 2009 - Corey Peters
We thought you might be interested in seeing some of the "behind the scenes" work that goes on in Team Fortress 2. The process usually starts with a team discussion: This helps us determine the goals of the map we're going to build. In this case, we wanted a game mode that had an intense, centralized experience with quick player turnaround. We liked some of the facets of Arena mode, but it was clear that many players don't like to wait for the next round to play.
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August 13, 2009 - Robin Walker
Go check it out, and keep your eyes peeled for goodies!
*Has probably already been done by someone in the TF2 community. Please don’t sue us.
Continued...
August 12, 2009 - TF Announcer
I would like to thank you for emailing us to point out that Viaduct is not the first TF2 map to feature snow. More importantly, I would like to thank you for stopping.
Immediately.
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August 12, 2009 - TF2 Team
The Classless Update continues to class up the joint with some previews, including a brand new game mode and some retooled classic maps. Check it out, then fire back on the forums.
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August 11, 2009 - Robin Walker
After setting a new standard for Lack of Class in an FPS with the addition of Jarate (the jar-based Karate), we've raised the bar on lowering the tone even further with the first ever Classless Update!
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August 4, 2009 - Mike Booth
We've been shirking our updating duties here, so we thought it'd be a good time to do some quick housekeeping:
- We recieved a bunch of positive responses to the release of the .vmf source behind our official TF2 maps. As a result, we've decided to go ahead and release the source behind all the player character models, as well as associated animations. We hope this will make it much easier for custom modellers to design new character models, and for machinima makers to have more control over how characters animate in their movies. Look for that SDK update in the next week or so.
- Sticky bombs now get a reduced close range damage ramp up (like Rocket Launcher & Syringe Gun)
Continued...
July 15, 2009 - The Soldier
At ease, you worthless sons of mothers!
I've been asked to present our internet blog-reading public with this handsome collection of avatars, which I'm told you can use on Steam. I don't mind telling you I have no idea what any of the words in that last sentence meant. This is the problem with the youth of today: too much time inventing nonsense words, not enough time taking a bullet in the lung defending a hill. I don't have to know what the hell twitters and texting and body sprays are to understand that they're not the sort of thing men should be engaged in. Like conversations, or painting things that aren't a house.
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June 15, 2009 - Dave Riller
Today we're releasing an update to the Source SDK that includes the .vmf source files for many of the official TF2 maps. This is something we've wanted to do for a while, especially as we've been growing the range of game modes in TF. Here's the list of maps that are included in the update: Lumberyard, Ravine, Badlands, Dustbowl, Granary, Gravelpit, 2Fort, Badwater, Goldrush, and Hydro.
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June 8, 2009 - The Soldier
The men at TF2maps.net have devised some sort of box puzzle that they thought you'd enjoy. Let me clear this up right now: They are incorrect in this thinking. I have stared at this blasted thing all morning and I can't make heads or tails of it. This is the problem with today's youth, if you ask me. Spending all their time devising clever boxy word puzzles instead of doing something constructive, like pushups, or jumping on a live grenade, or sitting in a foxhole cradling a man in your arms and watching the blood run out of him and the life drain from his eyes, or sit-ups.
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May 22, 2009 - Erik Johnson
First off, a quick note: We put so much stuff into this update that we didn't manage to cover it all on the internets before the update went live, so we made a special Bonus page. In addition, our merchandising crew had as much fun coming up with Spy & Sniper themed merchandise as we did making the update, so make sure you go and check it all out.
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May 21, 2009 - TF2 Team
...is live. What are you waiting for? Go play!
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May 20, 2009 - Saxton Hale
Oi! You! On the internet! Click this link!
But wait. First, is your boss around? No? Well get him over here! He is going to love this! Your fiancée's parents too. Heck, gather everyone around your computer right now, then read them this prepared statement:
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May 19, 2009 - Stavros Xanthis
Hello to you! My name is Stavros. I am now Vice President of Valve game company! Is very exciting! But much work. I am now head programmer, animator and game designer, plus I am washing Robin's clothes. (So many beef stains!)
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May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
"Marianne, send in someone please. Anyone at all. Oi! Send in someone with one eyebrow! That'd be marvelous."
"Sir, you've fired everyone."
"Already? But it's not even eight o'clock."
"You've outdone yourself, sir."
Continued...
May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
I think I've found my man. Valve's staff is now down to two employees: me and our Greek intern Stavros Xanthis. We're sitting in the main board room, staring at each other from across the table. I turned up the thermostat as far as it will go. It's hard to make him out behind the waves of heat coming out of the vents, but I think he looks guilty.
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May 18, 2009 - Jay Pinkerton
"Alden, you have three seconds to tell me why you're fired."
"Wait, what? I—"
"You're fired."
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May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
Valve's head of HR, Kathy, just came to talk to me. I'd been lining up employees in a row against the wall so I could run past and fire them faster.
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May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
As many of you know, the Meet the Spy video was leaked this weekend. Some of you on the forum have wondered if Valve leaked it on purpose. And until we find the clown who did leak it, the answer to that is yes.
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May 18, 2009 - TF2 Team
You've met the Scout, the Soldier, the Demoman, the Heavy, the Engineer, and the Sniper. Then, for some reason, a sandwich. But now it's time to meet the stealthiest, shiftiest, most secretive, suit-wearing TF team member of all...
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May 15, 2009 - TF2 Team
Day 4 of the Sniper update brings us…uh… hold on, that’s not…
Holy hell. All those conspiracy theorists on the TF forum couldn’t have been right all along, could they? Pyro's going to be inconsolable now.
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May 14, 2009 - TF2 Team
Sniper shows off the latest addition to his arsenal: the Razorback, a beautiful hand-carved tribal shield with a shocking modification.
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May 14, 2009 - Eric Smith
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the spiffy TF2 video made by AyesDyef over here and check out how spot he really is here. It was his birthday earlier this month, so if you see him on a Goldrush out there, wish him a happy birthday before you shoot him!
Continued...
May 13, 2009 - TF2 Team
Day 2 of our Sniper Update is live, this time with a rundown on a new game mode and two new arena maps. Plus a postcard from Sniper, who likes to keep his parents updated on his exciting, legal, not-being-a-crazed-gunman job.
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May 12, 2009 - Robin Walker
No, the Huntsman doesn’t stun. It pins dead/dying players.
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May 12, 2009 - TF2 Team
The Sniper Update is upon us.
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May 5, 2009 - Eric Smith
Also, a quick note: The fine fellows at Gang Garrison have just released version 2.1 on their webpage. We played a bunch of 2.0, and can't wait to spend some time with the new update. There's a ton of new additions, from Control Point mode to Killcams to Manviches, so even if you've played it before, you should head over there and check it out!
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May 5, 2009 - Robin Walker
The Sniper has been a tricky class to update. In particular, designing an alternative to the Sniper Rifle has been a challenge. To understand why, we need to go back, way back, into the mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and we started working on TF2. If it helps, you can listen to the Doctor Who Theme while you read.
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April 2, 2009 - Greg Cherlin
April 1, 2009 - Robin Walker
March 12, 2009 - Robin Walker
One of the things we've been thinking about for a while now is how to improve the player experience around finding a server to play on. It's a tricky problem because our master servers need to ask a game server for its details, and that server can lie to us if it wants to. We decided we needed to find a way of scoring servers, with a goal of finding and delisting ones we considered "bad". The scoring system had to penalize lying without penalizing custom game rules, because some players like custom game rules. Best case, the system needed to work entirely from data that didn't come from the servers themselves, so they couldn't lie to us in any way to affect it.
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February 25, 2009 - TF Announcer
Honestly.
Please, do take a cursory glance at the missive directly below this one. Take care to notice its author, and the dismally recent date of its posting.
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February 18, 2009 - TF Announcer
It saddens me that despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, some of you insist on finding new ways to fail.
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February 17, 2009 - Robin Walker
The news you've all been waiting for: The Scout Update!
Also, we released an update yesterday with a change that needs some clarification. The update notes said this:
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February 4, 2009 - Greg Cherlin
On Tuesday we shipped an update that added a bunch of features / bugfixes / balancing tweaks that came out of the community's feedback. In particular, it made some changes to the underlying TF damage system, and as part of that, it modified the way critical hits are determined. We thought it might be interesting to dig a little into the change, and hopefully give you some insight into our thinking.
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January 28, 2009 - Robin Walker
The Scout was one of the first TF2 classes we worked on when we decided to try out a more stylized approach to the game. As a result, his concept art is further afield, and in the eyes of our artists, much more embarrassing. This might be exacerbated by their desire to not have people looking at a piece of their artwork and not liking it, from an artistic point of view. Concept art has a different purpose than that, and so the effort to make it look great is usually unnecessary. In short, there's a special place in hell that all our artists hope we'll go to for showing you their concept art.
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January 27, 2009 - Robin Walker
We're just about done with the Scout pack, and our design and coding has already moved on to the next pack. The weapons and achievements are all nailed down, and we just have to finish up the final artwork on them. We like to do the final art as late as possible to ensure that we don't waste any work, which turned out to be a good decision this time around due to the large number of unlockables we tried out as alternatives to the Scattergun. Balancing his replacement weapon has been very tricky due to large threat difference of the Scout between skilled and non-skilled hands. More on that soon.
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December 10, 2008 - Robin Walker
We've been pretty quiet lately, but thankfully, that's about to end. In the next few days we'll have an update out that has a couple of new features for the Engineer and Spy, and a variety of other smaller fixes.
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October 16, 2008 - Valve Writing Staff
Since the release of Meet the Sandvich in August, several people have asked us how something we'd boasted would be "our magnum opus," "over four hours long" and "make Citizen Kane look like something dumb a complete idiot would make," ended up being one un-dramatic minute spent inside a refrigerator.
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October 8, 2008 - Robin Walker
Work on the next class pack is gearing up, a little slower than we'd like. In the meantime, I thought I'd post some answers to the common email questions we receive.
How do respawn waves work? Is my respawn time affected by my performance? Why do they exist at all?
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September 17, 2008 - Robin Walker
Well, it's been a couple of weeks since we updated the blog, and we thought it was time to let you know why we've been so quiet. The last couple of weeks we've actually been moonlighting on Left 4 Dead. While the L4D team has been focusing on finishing up the core cooperative gameplay, we've been helping them by working on their Versus mode. Versus is the recently-announced competitive mode where one team plays the Survivors and one team plays the Infected. We've learned a lot while working on TF2 in the last year, and we were able to apply some of those lessons to Versus mode. As a result, we've just finished adding critical hits, respawn waves, flawless auto-team balancing, and facestabs to L4D, while removing anything that looked remotely like a grenade. I kid, I kid.
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August 28, 2008 - Dhabih Eng
The path to arriving at a final design for a character is sometimes a long and winding one. This was especially the case for the Demoman and we thought it would be interesting to step through that process and shed a little light on how we arrive at our final designs. Early on in the process, soon after we decided that we were going to start a new, more stylized direction for TF2 it opened up a whole range of possibilities in terms of what that meant visually. One of the first (albeit short-lived) ideas that was being thrown around was to try to recreate a look of claymation for our game. The idea was to make the world look like a miniature set built for clay figures which animated and gibbed into chunks of clay.
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August 19, 2008 - Dhabih Eng
We decided to create a new TF environment after sensing some desert-fatigue, both internally and externally. The new theme had to be a departure from the current look without being so different that the characters felt out of place in it. We also wanted to leverage some content from our existing environments, since crafting every asset from scratch would mean we'd be moving the release beyond Valve time and into the realm of geologic time.
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August 11, 2008 - Robin Walker
We've been a little quiet for the last week as we've put the finishing touches on the Heavy update. We thought the Pyro pack was the biggest we'd be doing for a while, due to the large changes to the Pyro, but the Heavy update has turned out to be even bigger. In addition to the three unlockable weapons and thirty-five achievements for the Heavy, we've got a new game mode with five new arenas for it, a new Payload map focusing on more open spaces than Goldrush, and another popular community-made map. Throughout the rest of the week we'll be giving you the details on all this, and if all goes well, you'll have your hands on it shortly afterwards.
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August 1, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
One of the things we're looking at for the next update is the creation of a new type of environment for our levels to be built in. We're pretty happy with the way our environments have turned out so far, but as we create more and more maps with these achievement packs, we want our level designers to have more to work with in terms of giving their settings a unique look.
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July 24, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
For this week's update, we've got another set of trading card images to take a look at. The focus of our most recent achievement update, the Pyro is a character that players may have seeing a lot of lately - making life a nightmare inferno for both the Spy and Medic.
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July 16, 2008 - Eric Smith
One of the things we hope to do on this blog is to point out the creative things that members of the TF2 community are up to. The Steampowered TF2 forum members have been collecting links ever since TF2 was released, and you can take a look at the list (and its accompanying 46-pages-so-far (!) forum thread)here.
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July 9, 2008 - Robin Walker
Well, we were expecting some response to A Heavy Problem, but we severely underestimated just how much interest everyone had in contributing. If you're one of the many folks who emailed us proposals and haven't received a response, please accept our apologies, because there's just too many for us to reply to all of them. From the large amount of feedback and forum activity, it's clear that many of you found this interesting, so we'll definitely be posting more design goals. For those of you still thinking about it, here are some more tools to use in evaluating ideas:
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July 3, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
To continue from the previous week, today we have some additional finished trading card images for you to take a look at - the Heavy and the Medic.
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July 1, 2008 - Robin Walker
As Gabe mentioned in his lengthy response to an email recently, the next class pack will focus on the Heavy. For the Medic and Pyro packs we kept our goals for the pack pretty close to our chest, but for the Heavy we've decided to open up the process a little.
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June 27, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
During the development process with most of our games, we end up creating content that, for a variety of reasons, may never see the light of day. Sometimes we may not have the time to bring the content to finish, sometimes we use them as a company-only experiment, and sometimes the content just isn't in line with what we're doing at the time. Needless to say, there's a fair bit of cool stuff that we've never been able to share with our fans. We're happy to say that this blog has now given us a unique format in which to share some of the unused artwork with you.
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June 24, 2008 - Robin Walker
In any game there's often a bunch of hidden complexity behind some of the simplest looking features, and TF2 is no exception. One example is that of the Medic's medigun. From a player perspective, it appears simple enough: point it at a team mate, press the button, and it'll heal them. After playing with a bit, most players notice that they have to stay near their target and maintain line-of-sight to their target. After playing with it a lot, some players notice that there's some variability in the rate at which they heal their targets. I thought it might be interesting for Medics to explain what's going on here, and why.
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June 18, 2008 - Eric Kirchmer
When producing concept art, our artists believe in providing a variety of options for any given subject. A single concept rendering would place too strict a constraint on the resulting game design.
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June 18, 2008 - Robin Walker
Now that we've settled into regular releases of content, we've found ourselves wanting a better way to talk directly to the TF2 community about the state of the game and some of the reasoning behind the choices we're making. Our hope is that this blog will accomplish that, and give everyone some better insight into our development process as well.
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