f13.net

Incoming next week, and it looks big.

- 2 new maps( cp_steel and a new Payload style map )
- 1 new game mode with 5 "arenas"
- heavy weapons and achievements
- new meet the team related video

http://www.teamfortress.com/
http://steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/

edit: they updated their blog with a clarification about the new game mode

Oh valve how i love thee...

Every time I take a break from tf2 another uber update comes out.  :awesome_for_real:

I  :heart: Payload maps. CP_Steel looks familiar. Maybe I played a beta version of it? Heavy is my favorite guy to use, but since everyone and their mother will be playing as him, I'll have a chance to rack up some massive Pyro and Medic stats.

edit: Ah, CP_Steel is community-made.

Steel was developed by a goon and has been running on the lost continent servers for quite a while now in various stages of development and playtesting.

If you stalked me in TF2, that is where I hang out, and you may have played it there.

I think I played it on a server called Jimmy Likes Men.

The heavy melee weapon (http://steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/kgb.htm)

Woo, I was close (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13652.msg473424#msg473424) with my "berserker boxing" idea, except I figured it'd give invuln instead of kritz. 

Kritz is slightly more awesome, even if it doesn't quite go with the "increased survivability" thing they were talking about.

Interesting that unlike the other melee upgrades, this will only be of any use at all when there are multiple enemies in a relatively small area (so you can run around killing them all before the kritz runs out).

If you look at the icons for the heavy achievements, the file names spell out generally what each one is.  They look pretty :drill:.  By which I mean, none of them sound half as stupid as the "uber scout kills" or "flame a spy that's doing this particular taunt" achievements.  Looking forward to getting these.

Another Payload Map (http://steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/badwater.htm). I see this as a good thing.

Yeah, it looks pretty fun.  Seems like there are more lines of attack for blue instead of narrow Chokepoints of Death like on goldrush.

New heavy weapon - Natascha (http://steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/natascha.htm).  -25% damage, slows targets down.  That's an interesting tradeoff.

Rumor is that the shotgun replacement is going to be a sandwich.  Supported by the fact that one of the achievements involves sandwich eating.

Hayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Lookit that. I wanted a gun to be called Sasha. I basically got it. ^_^

Acheivement descriptions have been added to the page now, and is pretty much pure  :awesome_for_real:

Getting hit with a rocket counts as all 4, rite?

That's 1000 bullets, for those of you keeping score.

I like how all the "in a single life" achievements are pretty easy.  Except for the 20 kills one, but at least heavies have a motivation to cooperate with medics on that one now.

You can do the heavy industry one in the room during setup. It takes 12 seconds, right?

can we just .exe this in a week?

Most likely, unless they're fixing that hole as part of this update.

It still kind of boggles my mind that people don't like getting these things during normal play, but I guess it just makes me that much more special when I get the little trophy over my head.   :awesome_for_real:

Why would it boggle your mine? Achievements should be self-achieved (hence the fucking name!), if a game has even one achievement that requires someone else be doing something, I'll just as soon cheat. F relying on other people.

For the medic achievements as first released, where getting all the weapons relied on doing every single one of the bullshit achievements, I totally get it.  I didn't cheat them myself because I wanted to take a shot at them in-game (and to my immense satisfaction I've gotten a couple of the ones I thought would be impossible), but I could totally understand people cheating because they wanted to try the ubersaw or whatever.

For the pyro and heavy ones, and with the new unlock thresholds, I don't get it.  You can unlock all the weapons and then some without any reliance on other people in very little time, and it's lots of fun to do it.  I wish I could reset some of those achievements and do them again, or have it keep a count of ones I've gotten multiple times over (like OMGWTFBBQ).  The couple of difficult ones beyond what's needed for the unlocks don't do anything but light up icons on your Steam page that nobody but you will ever look at, and you'll know that you cheated to get them so it's not like you'll get any sort of satisfaction out of seeing them all lit up.  I don't understand what the appeal is in that case.

I'll probably play TF2 again once this update goes out because I love me some Heavy.

But then everyone will likely be heavy.

I for one look forward to the day or so of all-heavy teams.  Both from the perspective of sniping the fatties and from being part of a giant mob of Sasha-wielding death.

Oh, its just for the unlocks.  I LOVE getting random ones that show up based on skill or whatever.

I don't like knowing them before hand and I don't like having to grind anything to get new unlocks.

It's all quaint until you start to get tired with a game. Then you look for a way to "complete" it as fast as possible.

Yup. I've been tired of the game for a long time. 100 hours will do that to a game.

But if you .exe them you'll never get the random ones, because once they're checked off you'll never see yourself get them.  Is getting the weapons a week early worth depriving yourself of that joy?

Just don't look at the achievements and don't think about the unlocks.  If the Pyro ones are any indication, you will have all of the unlocks automatically after maybe a dozen rounds played with that class, whether you try to or not.  And you'll have 20 of those wonderful little "gratz, you just did a cool thing" moments along the way.

Also:


Uninstalling is the purest form of completion.  SWG taught me that.

(edit) I just now wondered how many hours I've been playing TF2 so I went to my stats page to figure it out.  165.  Goddamn.

Let me clear it up, since I'm brain dead tonight.

I don't like anything tied to new weapons.  If they were just cosmetic, maybe, but they're not.

It's new mechanisms added to the game, which make it more fun imo, but I don't want to have to play a certain way in order to 'unlock them'.

I like acheivements.  I like trophies.  I like that stuff.  It's fun, and does add a certain something to shoot for when you're having a blast anyways, and a nice surprise when you're not paying attention.

I do not like having to unlock new gameplay modes which is what the new equipment is for me.  I don't like it fucking Soul Caliber, I don't like it in TF2; I do not like having to unlock content which is right fucking there.

So you have moral objections to the concept of unlockables and therefore feel compelled to spite... someone... by circumventing the unlock mechanism, even if doing this removes a part of the game you'd otherwise enjoy, and you'd get the unlockables either way?

That's sort of insane, but I guess I understand it.  I mean, I was sort of annoyed to find out that the new weapons were hidden behind achievements, but not to the extent that I felt compelled to sabotage my own fun as a form of protest.   :-P  At its best, the process of getting the achievements is the most fun part of the game for me, and even at its worst the satisfaction of finally getting a tough one is usually worth whatever pain in the ass it took to get it.  Like that goddamn gnome launch.

The unlocks don't even factor into it at this point because after the pyro update they happen automatically.  If you like playing the class, you'll get all the weapons faster than you get used to them.  And if you don't play the class, why do you care?

Yes. Yes it is. I get my joy from CRY SOME MORE, not from "Look at me, I have a brief trophy on my head, now it's gone." Fortunately, the unlock.exe will very likely work and I'll be slowing people on the first day.

I think you and I have fundamentally different ways of enjoying some things. For example, I would never, ever do the gnome launch. You, on the other hand, would probably play Desert bus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller%27s_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus) if it e-mailed your friends upon completion.

See, not liking achievements at all is one thing.  You hate fun, that's understandable.  But Hat said he likes achievements.  Hence my confusion.

I'm going to make a game; it's a white box with a red button in it. Each time you push the button, a counter in the corner goes up.

There's a separate achievement for each time there's an additional digit, and every time you hit an achievement the windows 95 trumpet sounds.

Just for you.



Hat? He's crazy.

I'll tell you what I tell everyone who pitches me game ideas: If carrying a gnome around is more fun than your game, you need to refine your core gameplay.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the new minigun has actual tradeoffs.

But it does make me suspect that the 'slowed' opponents will be practically rooted to make sure that the unlockable is hideously overpowered.

God damn.

I LIKE Achievements.  I don't like equipment unlocking.

Wtf is confusing you guys?

Tying the two together is stupid.  Give me a "You killed 20000 Soldiers!" trophy, put it on a page so I can stroke myself at home or at work, but don't say "You killed 20000 Soldiers, here's a nifty new gameplay element!"  Just give me the fucking gameplay element.

qft

But they already do just give it to you.   :headscratch:

Unless you consider just playing the game at all to be some sort of chore, like Bhodi does.  But that comes back to hating fun.  And if you hate fun to begin with, I'm not sure why you hate fun any less when it comes with slight modifications to your weapons.  I mean, if you hate playing a heavy right now, a new gun that slows people down a little bit probably isn't going to make you change your mind.

I thought I understood it, but no matter which angle I try to follow the thought process from, I end up coming up with a contradiction.

They don't come through normal play, in my experience though.  I don't think about achievements while I'm in the middle of playing and thus it's rare that I do some of the wacky stuff that it wants and thus I get achievements at an extremely slow pace.

That pace is slower then I want to be able to play with the new toys.  I don't mind the achievements being slow, I mind the "physical"  rewards for getting the achievements being slow to get.

Are you talking about the medic achievements (as originally launched, where lots of them were hard to do and you needed all 36), or the pyro achievements (where you only need 20 and about 30 of them are things you get automatically)?

What he said.

Someone who hates equipment unlocking in all cases wouldn't use the .exe, because it unlocks equipment.  The only solution in that case would be to not play that class at all, since that's the only way you're guaranteed to avoid unlocks.

Now you're just being silly.

 :why_so_serious:

That doesn't even make any sense.

Nor does your phrasing.  It would probably be more accurate to say that you hate equipment locking, not equipment unlocking.

But if that were the case then I'd be hearing a lot more complaining about pre-loading, since that gives you content on your machine that is locked from you.

Is it perhaps stuff that is locked away from you that other people might have access to that gets your goat?

 :uhrr:

....

Glad you can have an actual discussion here, but I guess you had to make the green in your name fit.

Yes, that's all 100% true.  That's my whole point though.  It's cockblocking so that people who have more time or whatever can get new gameplay modes.  It's stupid.  Don't lock the equipment.  Patch it all in.

Achievements are just for ePeen.  Gameplay modes actively change the way that I can play the game.  I'd like access to those without having to grind through ANYTHING.

(http://steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/images/bg_home_day5_temp.jpg)

Monday...ish?

I guess this will change when it goes up.

so someone on another forum noticed something.

 In the scout video it has a heavy eating a sandwich.

There were people that didn't notice that?

It's a pretty sure thing that the shotgun replacement is a sandwich, given that one of the heavy achievements is eating 100 sandwiches.

New game mode announced. (http://www.steampowered.com/tf2/heavy/arena.htm)  At first reading it sounds like they took most people's least favorite part of the game (sudden death) and made it into a game mode.  If this is true, I predict that it will get a handful of staunchly dedicated servers (probably run by people who miss the nail-biting tension of Counter-Strike) and everyone else will shun it like tc_hydro.

The maps look pretty, though.

(http://www.steampowered.com/tf2/heavy/images/05_lumberyard_2.jpg) (http://www.steampowered.com/tf2/heavy/images/05_lumberyard_2.jpg)

ewww :uhrr:

I suspect they are hoping to convert some of their CS player base into TF2 players. The fact that there is only one central capture point should minimize the excessive camping we see in sudden death. I suspect the fact that arena is a dedicated game mode will also loosen people up a bit. Sudden death tends to come after a long engagement and after 15 minutes or more of playing, both teams are pretty risk adverse. People will hopefully have less invested in any given round of arena.

Honestly, I'm kinda jazzed about arena. One of my favorite things about CS was bullshitting with other players between rounds. As long as it changes to all-talk like it does in CS:S, this should be fun. It'll be a great mode for laundry folding.   :awesome_for_real:

Hmmm, not sure about Arena mode. One the one hand, it sounds kind of fun, OTOH, it sounds like a ridalin-soaked clickfest.

Anyone see the TF2 Weighted Companion Cube Soccer (http://www.wegame.com/watch/TF2_Companion_Cube_Soccer/)?  Looks kind of fun.

Not to go too off topic of course.

Why would you ever be anything besides a sniper or a soldier?

I think this would only work if it were restricted to one class with a Heavy as a "goalie"

That does in fact look like a good time. Doing hail mary "kicks" with a demoman would be fun, not to mention airblasting the cube as a pyro. Actually a pyro team would be pretty sweet; they could pass fairly accurately and block soldier/demoman kicks.

Om nom nom (http://steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/sandvichVideo.htm)
 :awesome_for_real:

MY BLOOD!!! HE PUNCHED OUT ALL MY BLOOD!!!!    :drill:  :drill:  :drill:

Such a copout.

http://www.steampowered.com/tf2/heavy/sandvich.htm

Om nom nom?

It's copyright OMMNOMNOM. Look closely.

I like the sandwich idea, but I think 4 seconds may be a bit too long for half health. We'll see how it balances.

That's funny, my first thought was that making it unlimited was pretty overpowered.  But 4 seconds of vulnerability... tough to say.

One thing is for certain: the scout WILL have a "kill a heavy while he's eating a sandvich" achievement.  Shit, if I were them I'd go back and put a "toasted sandvich" achievement in for the pyro while I was at it.

Kill a heavy WITH a BAT achievement. It should be called 'Sup?'

I wonder if he drops his sandwich if you kill him while he is eating it, and if so, do you get health? Or ammo? I can shoot rockets after picking up a baseball bat, why not a sandwich?

He almost has to drop it; it's pretty firmly ingrained in TF2's design that you get a useful reward for killing someone, even if all they had out was a baseball bat or whatever.  In all other cases the reward is equivalent to an ammo pickup, but making a dropped sandvich work like a small medpack instead would be awesome.

So, anyone tried out the Arena mode?  I was pleasantly surprised.  Rounds are much shorter than Counter-Strike due to the small map size and central objective, and the teams are shuffled automatically.

Also, got 6 new achievements in the hour or so I played last night.   :why_so_serious:

The update's out?

Yup, popped yesterday around 3 PDT.

I was pretty happy with arena, but I like CS, so take that with a grain of salt. It's all of the fun parts of sudden death, minus the obnoxious camping. I think the longest round I saw ran around 1:45; the shortest was 27 seconds. I also really dig the automatic team scrambling; I can see it minimizing the number of times you get steamrolled.

Also the heavy achievements are pretty cool. I picked up two in my first 45 seconds of playing.  :heart:

Wow. I love the new payload map. Much less cramped than Goldrush.

I'm really liking cp_steel.  All the interconnected bits are  :heart:.

2 hours in, 15 achievements, which means I've got sandvich.  I swear I haven't run out of minigun ammo once while I was carrying a shotgun, but now that I don't have it any more it seems like every other turn I'm switching over to that slot looking for a gun and coming up with a snack instead.

Yeah, I was playing dustbowl last night, defending on the last dustbowl segment. I ran out of ammo clearing the underground hallway, ran up the stairs and was confronted with my pyro nemesis on the other side. Having a sandvich instead of a shotgun (got the shotgun achieve on an earlier segment), I switched to fists, taunted and just barely managed to kill him with my POW fingers before being roasted alive.

It was pretty :drill: and the chat scroll went wild over the kill.

Later on in that game I got the critical-punch achievement off the same guy in essentially the same manner. Seeing him ragdoll-fly down towards my team with just one punch was hilarious.

As I suspected, the sandwich is too slow to be useful. The shotgun far outweighs it for being able to fire on the move.

Badwater Basin defense= utterly badass for spies.  I got first by over 20 points in a pub my first Badwater round, and I didn't even know the layout of the map that well.  So so many little alcoves for a defensive spy to hide in, come out of, and devastate half the offense. 

 :heart: Badwater Basin. Haven't tried the other maps, but that one is fun. I only played as a heavy but I can see how that one will be a lot of fun for most classes. Having the payload game be all in one self-contained map helped a lot.

Oh, I confirmed last night that heavies drop sandviches and that picking them up gets you health.  I mowed down a snacking heavy in one of the vents on ctf_turbine, and picked up 50 health while running over his bullet-riddled carcass.  Not sure if it scales according to your own max health or not.

Unlocker still works.

3 hours in, have Natascha.  I'm not entirely sure yet how useful she is.  I played nothing but Badwater last night and ended up swapping off between Sasha for offense and Natascha for defense, since you definitely need Sasha's damage for punching through a defensive line.  On defense it seems like the slowdown effect might be useful against charging pyros, and I think it might have made a difference a few times in letting me pick off a fleeing sniper or scout before he could get behind cover.

I feel that I have mastered the Zen of Sandvich.  It requires a very different fighting style from what I'm used to, though; you need to avoid over-committing yourself so that you can duck behind cover when your health gets low and have enough time to nosh before a pyro can charge up and toast you.

How useful is the Sandvich, really?  90% of the time, when you are that low on health, you've also pretty low on ammo.  So you have to run back from the frontlines to get ammo anyway.  The Sandvich won't help there. 

I'm very rarely out of ammo, but frequently out of health. I tend to be very aggressive about picking up fallen enemy weapons though.

If you're low on ammo, either you're spending more than 100 bullets per enemy or tiny men on your team are getting there first.  Damn tiny men.

The one wish I had with the Sandvich is that it broke when the Heavy hit max health and was getting healed.

A few times last night I would run off to a Medic! call and see a Heavy chilling there eating a fucking snack.  That may just be a coordination thing I need to get used to as it radically changes my playstyle as a Medic.

The KGB are awesome.  The first round after I got them I decked a medic and then switched to my kruber-powered gun to mow down his heavy.   :drill:

5:30 hours /played when I got them, btw, which is maybe a little less time than all the pyro unlocks took.  I think it's safe to say they learned their lessons from the Medic update.

I do not have a single unlock so far.  :ye_gods:

And I HATE HATE HATE the fucking party mode.

huh?

Also, are there any hints as to which class is seeing the next update?

It is a birthday party ... (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=718148)

Buh?  According to your SteamID page you have 2 of them.  Some kind of bug?

where are the unlocks listed? I looked at my page, and DerHelm's page, and I can't see 'em.

Team Fortress 2 -> Statistics

I see the "Records and Stats" tab, and the "Achievements" tab, but nothing that indicates I've unlocked anything special. Now, granted, I probably haven't, but DerHelm aparently has, and I'm not seeing anything so marked.

They're implied by the achievements; if you have two "Heavy milestones" you should have the Sandvich and Natascha unlocked.

Here's Helm with 2 milestones. (http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197992849573/stats/TF2?tab=achievements&agroup=heavy)

Here's you about halfway to the first one. (http://steamcommunity.com/id/Engels777/stats/TF2?tab=achievements&agroup=heavy)

And here's my giant pile of e-peen. (http://steamcommunity.com/id/samwise/stats/TF2?tab=achievements)

One thing it doesn't keep track of that I wish it did is the playtime for each class over the past two weeks, so you can see how much of each you've been playing lately in addition to your lifetime stats.  The day of the heavy update I had to make a note of the fact that I had 14:41 playtime as a heavy up to that point so I could accurately track how long the different milestones took.

Really, now that I've seen Spore's "timeline" screen I just want that in every game I own.   :grin:

Aha, thanks a bunch! Makes more sense now. So, anything that's a 'heavy only' achievement is considered part of the 'heavy pack' and goes towards getting the 10/16/22 milestones?

Exactly.  Same with the pyro and medic packs; you get your first unlock at 10 achievements, your second at 15, and your last at 20 (not counting the achievements for the milestones themselves).  Originally the medic milestones were at 12-achievement increments, which made getting the last one basically impossible through normal play, but when the pyro update came out they retroactively shifted them to the 10/15/20 scheme to make them reasonable.

Yep. Got them a few hours ago.  :awesome_for_real:

So,  remind me:

How do you get the freeze cam taunting achievement?

Also,  managed to kill someone with the Heavy taunt the second time I tried it in a real match.  I laughed.

The Heavy one has an extra twist in that you have to do it while ubered.  The next time you have an uber and you kill everything in sight before the uber runs out, hit your taunt button.  The last guy you killed will get a deathcam pic of you taunting him while glowy, and as long as everything got killed or escaped anyway your medic shouldn't be too pissed.   :awesome_for_real:

For the other ones you basically just taunt after you kill someone, which is a fun thing to do anyway, and you'll get it sooner or later (for the medic one I had to try a few times because it was finicky about what was in the frame, but for the pyro one I got each taunt on my first try).

I fired up tf2 this weekend after a half-year break and got a ton of achievements...

... medic achievements of course, since everyone's playing a heavy. :P I got like 5 of them in one game, heh.


-- Z.

The heavy talks about his sandvich (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioU-5aN_zXg)

That voice actor needs to clear his goddamn throat.

Yeah, those clips are a little extra-gravelly.

Montage of finger taunt kills. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SLe8lg9G0c)

Ok, so what key do you press to use a taunt as a weapon? I didn't even know you could do that.

G or Z. I remapped it I think though, so that may be not be right.

The finger point and the hadouken are the only lethal taunts. G is the default taunt key.

Just unlocked the K.G.B.s, it WAS fun to unlock them in real games.  :awesome_for_real:

How do I get the Hadouken taunt? All my Pyro ever does is wave his flamethrower above his head like an ape.

The Shotgun gives you the Hadouken taunt.

Every weapon except the sapper and the engineer's PDA has a unique taunt.

How much damage do the taunts do?

Instakill.  At lease the Heavy and Pyro taunts do.

Doh! I shoulda known that. Thanks.

This is harder than it looks in the video.

How long is the range? It seems to be very short.
Does it aim from your reticule when you execute the taunt, or when the taunt visibly "fires"?

Any tips?

Yeah, I was just trying to get some kills with the taunt- no success, even though I completed them before being gunned down. Harder than it looks, for sure.

So, I don't know if this is a recent change, but it looks like intermediate progress on achievements is recorded server-side.  I logged into one of the freeplay PCs over here for some TF2 LAN action under my Steam account, and all my unfinished achievements were exactly where I'd left them at home.

Now I have to see when I get home if it remembers all the Crazy Ivans I racked up during that match.   :awesome_for_real:

All your stats are recorded according to your Steam ID on the Community Profile, so they should be the same no matter what machine you play them on.

I found it to be not that difficult to get kills with the Heavy taunt.  Hanging out near corners helps, or behind walls, helps.  Pop out and do taunt, jump back into cover.

On goldrush,  managed to kill a few with taunt that were hiding behind the cart.


I admit,  I giggle like an idiot every time a get off a taunt kill.

YEAH, BABY!

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/40386/Screenshots/TF2/borscht.jpg) (http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/40386/Screenshots/TF2/borscht.jpg)