ubercharged.net

It’s great that Valve puts so much into the TF2 community. Let me get that out of the way straight up. The stuff they’re doing with the new medic weapons, and new maps are great. I finally played the new update today, and… WOW. Gold Rush is a stroke of genius. Gotta be about the best TF2 map I’ve played. I mean, there’s something in there for everyone. Whatever class you want to play, there’s room for it in there.

It’s particularly well suited to pyro antics. I had my first game on it, and I totally rocked out. Top scored and all. Its the way the pyro is meant to be played - lots of back alleys to allow attacks from unexpected angles and quick sweep-and-retreat style play.

And the feel and intensity of the game is just great. Valve has really hit on a winning formula with this game mode. The balance in the games I played tonight constantly shifted back and forth as the cart moved through different sections of the map. There is so much variety in there that it forces you to constantly adapt the tactics to the ever changing game state.

Highlight of the evening’s play was where I was defending as a heavy. During warm up, me and a medic hid round a corner out of sight of the attackers. The medic charged up a critzcrieg and opened it up on me just as the count down timer finished and the gates opened. The attackers rushed out straight into a hail of crit chain gun bullets. Carnage everywhere. It was magnificent.

10 out of 10.

But about these new unlockable medic achievements…

Achievements are the by-product of socially retarded and undersexed game developers

I just really can’t get excited about locking the new medic gear behind the achievement gimmick that is so in vogue at the moment. I mean it’s great if you’re into that sort of thing. Kind of an e-bragging right for the people who actually care (I don’t). If you want to spent 3 hours laying down 1000 sticky bombs so you can get the “draw a picture of Doug Lombardi with scorch marks” achievement so you can boast to all the other cool kids at school, then all power to you - just don’t do that useless crap on any server that I’m on.

Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation currently has more internet authority (and traffic) than Jesus. He had some insightful words to say on the subject in last weeks Super Smash Bros. Brawl review, so I’ll e-quote it here:

It’s a long watch (but well worth it), so I’ll paraphrase liberally (i.e. make crap up):

Game developers don’t have sex, or hang out with cool people, or go out to parties, or even talk to human beings. So they pump out self-indulgent, pointless, and time consuming achievements cause they think everyone else likes to spend hours of their life endlessly playing through every edge case orifice of their game, because they are just that s**t hot.

I blame Blizzard, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony for this crap

Blizzard and their golden goose of orcs and elves has lobotomized the prefrontal cortex of the game industry. Compared to the golden age of yesteryear (which never actually existed, but everyone thinks occurred about the time they were in college playing the game-du-jour for 10 hours a day), today’s game development efforts have turned into a stimulus/response reflex race to the bottom to transform every game into World of Warcraft.

Game developers look at Blizzard, see their pile of cash, and try to figure out how to replicate it. The answer that the triumvirate of evil (NinteMicroSony) came up with was to include an online system of shoe horning achievements into single player games that would otherwise have nothing what so ever to do with achievements. You got some androgynous anime-inspired waif to swing a super size sword and kill a boss? HAVE AN ACHIEVEMENT! You spent one man month hitting golf balls into hoops? ACHIEVEMENT! You crashed into every traffic light while it was orange while driving the wrong way around the track in your favorite arcade racer? YOU BETCHA! ACHIEVEMENTS GALORE! All of which is annoying and stupid, but ultimately harmless.

It’s like they tried to headhunt the high-priced consultants that came up with PHAT EPIC L00T from the early days of MMORPGs, but instead they actually got the guys that came up with the idea of those kitset model magazines where they dripfeed you one piece of the Bismarck or some crap every week to try and keep your interest in their product. Except that you get so bored of waiting for the grind for each new piece that you lost interest in whatever the original product itself was. In the end you give up by the time you’ve barely even assembled the port lifeboats and the officers’ private latrine.

(Yes, I may have been one of those people that bought something just for the kitset model - but it was of the New Zealand Antarctic base, and it was Weet-Bix cereal, and I was 8 years old)

Now that’s fine. Let them think that and code in these achievements (it’s a waste of resources that could go into game polishing, but thats their business I guess if they want to make an inferior product). The problem is when they force you onto the achievement grind treadmill just to get core game play elements.

Lazy developers. You’re not fooling anyone

It makes it too easy for developers to get lazy and skimp on game content. Say that you market your game as having 40 hours of playable content? What is cheaper: developing a game that really has 40 hours of content, or just developing 2 hours worth, and including 20 “achievements” that you have to grind through unlock in order to reach all of that 2 hours of content?

I paid for this stuff. Why won’t you let me just have it?

Do you think that I find it fun to waste my time jumping through hoops for you? As I’ve already established, I don’t have time for that crap. I bought your game and I demand to be entertained. I play it because I find something intrinsically fun about it. I have all week at work to grind through repetitive mind numbing tasks (actually no, my job isn’t that bad, but you get the gist of it).

If you put the goodies up on a high shelf where I can’t reach, the game ceases to be fun within the time parameters I’ve got to play it. If madlep doesn’t have fun, madlep doesn’t buy your game. You don’t make money, and you go out of business, and you end up destitute living on a street corner holding a cardboard sign reading “will code achievements for food”

But there are particularly bad problems when we’re talking about unlockables and mutliplayer games:

Jim Raynor didn’t need unlockable grenades to beat back the zerg

It’s merely annoying to lock up single player content, but it’s down right broken to grant better stuff (or even different stuff) to some players in multi player games that just happen to have done more of your moronic little time wasters. Blizzard (despite their later sins), was the original master of finely balanced multi-player gaming with Star-craft. The whole game was open to begin with, and it was incredibly well balanced. Imagine if you had to grind through weeks of play just to be on a level playing field? Would Star-craft be the national phenomenon it is in South Korea today if new players had to go through that crap just to be able to get their butt kicked fair and square by that hyper active 8 year old genius?

Valve sponsored Roombaism

You know how I mentioned that I top scored as pyro at the beginning of the post? IT WAS BECAUSE THE ENTIRE SERVER WAS FULL OF MEDICS TRYING TO UBER DEMOMEN JUMPING OFF CLIFFS, MEDICS TRYING TO UBER SCOUTS, OR MEDICS TRYING TO UBER FIST HEAVIES (or the scouts or heavies or whatever from their clan helping them out)

Ridiculous stuff. What the hell did valve think would happen when they put such moronic criteria for the achievements in there?

(Co-incidentally, I was too damn lazy to take my own in game screen shot, so I googled for one, then I went to look at who to credit it with, and it turns out it’s by Shakey Lo, from my old Tribes 2 clan - |8| Hi Shakey! Shakey rocks as a Tribes 2 Heavy Offence player. Those were the days… )

Gold rush rocks, but I’m going to be sorely tempted not to even bother playing for the next few weeks till this crap dies down a bit.

Achievement farming

It actually took me sometime to find a public server with a real gold rush game - or a real game with any map for that reason. Partly because there is still a lot of popularity, and the servers genuinely are busy. But mostly because I had to go through about 5 different servers before I found one where players weren’t there with their clanmates/friends/whatever solely for the purpose of grinding achievements to get the unlocks so they could go and play normally afterwards.

What the hell is the point Valve?

If these achievements are supposed to be bringing so much fun to the game, why are people doing this?

It’s all very MMORPGish. Why do you spent two nights slaying fearsome murlocs? It’s so you can get the quest reward of a bigger sword. And you need a bigger sword to do what? That’s right! So you can go and slay mighty murlocs, so you can get an even bigger sword, so you can go and slay Elite murlocs and over and over.

My brain hasn’t implemented tail-recursion optimization so I get a call stack overflow a few weeks into a grind like this (that means “I get bored and quit” in english. Sorry for the computer science geekery, but it’s late and I should be asleep).

Well, the guys from Control Point had some fun, but they’re a fun bunch of people, and they’d even be able to amuse themselves at an antique bed-pan dealers convention:

The potential black market for fully unlocked characters

This hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge, but the entrepreneurs that brought the world gold-farming and power-levelling must be rubbing their hands together that Valve has opened up a new market for them. Why spend weeks levelling up a TF2 account to get all the unlocks when you can buy a ready made account from some shady guy dealing out of a Beijing area code?

Again: What the hell is the point Valve?

The biggest problem

madlep sucks at this kind of stuff. I’m just not patient enough, and at this rate I will never get to know the joy of ubersawing to build up my critzcrieg. Have pity on a poor crap player like me Valve!

Conclusion

So I don’t know what to make of all this. I’m obviously not a big fan of the whole unlockable concept. Hopefully the next few weeks are such a mess that Valve seriously rethinks the whole unlockables roadmap. Ideally they’ll just release new items for the other classes ready to play by all as soon as they come out - and do the same for the medic items.

Bring on the new weapons and abilities. Even keep the achievements if you really have want (I won’t be getting them).
But leave the unlockables out please!

Everyone has been asking why I haven’t posted the meet the scout vid yet.

Well, I had a bit of a family thing at the last minute - my Grandad died. He was 80, and a great guy. He had lived a good life, was mentally and physically sound, but he was old and that wouldn’t have lasted much longer. It was just his time. He went out quickly and with his dignity with a sudden heart attack. Everyone thought that was much better than slowly decaying over the next decade or so and causing pain for him and the family. He was much loved and there must have been at least 400 people at the funeral.

So I had to book a last minute flight back home to see him off, and now I’m staying with relatives in non-broadband land. This is about the first time I’ve been online.

Apparently Valve has spies watching me, and knows that the only time they can get away with big news releases is when I’m not around to poke fun at them, cause as soon as I was under internet radio silence, they pumped out the Latest Meet The Team Vid:

Meet The Scout.

So until I get somewhere that transfers faster than 3kb/s, I won’t be watching it for a while. But it’s Valve, so I’m sure it’s all good.

Quick note, cause I’m sure that anyone who cares has already read this in the million other regular gaming sites that cover “the news”, but Shacknews has the details on the new Medic changes (and a bit about Goldrush and such).

All sounds lovely. The achievement stuff is still in there, which I’m a bit dubious about (I wanna play TF2 - not organize rigged servers with buddies just to grind achievements - except I don’t have any buddies, so I’m screwed either way), but it all sounds quite interesting. The old permanent health plan buff is out, and this stuff is in:

The Blutsaugher
For players that earn one third of the 36 new medic achievements, they will be given a new syringe gun. Called “The Blutsaugher,” this new weapon no longer has the ability to score critical hits against an opponent. Instead it will draw health from enemies each time a syringe hits. Especially useful as a weapon to retreat away from the fight while staying alive.

The Critzcrieg
Once a medic has earned two thirds of the achievements, they will be granted “The Critzcrieg.” This new medigun uses its ubercharge not for invulnerability, but to give its recipient 100% chance to fire critical ordinance. Medics and the player they are charging need to be careful though, because as much fun as it is to fire critical rockets as fast as you can, the other team will see what you’re up to and try to put a quick stop to your plan.

The Ubersaw
For the determined medic that has earned all 36 of the new achievements, they will find themselves the proud owner of “The Ubersaw,” which will take damage done in melee attacks and convert it directly to ubercharge. Four hits with this new weapon will fully charge whatever medigun the medic has equpped.

Seriously, I don’t know where these names come from. They must have one guy at Valve working round the clock who’s job description is “Smoke Some Crack And Then Think Up Whacked Names For Game Concepts”.

More scope for medic shenanigans all round. I’m picking we’ll see double uber/critzcriegs as a standard tactic as predicted some time ago.

Oh, and now I’ll have to go and rebrand this whole site to critzcrieged.net (yes, I’ve already registered the domain name )

Alex Petraglia from Primotech has reported on the talk given by Jason Mitchell, one of Valve’s leading graphics engineers, on Team Fortress 2’s art style and visual technology. There is a lot of interesting stuff in there, especially if you’re interested in the game development side of things.

The real payload though, are the details on the “Meet The Scout” video that should be out in the next couple of weeks from Valve. There is even an MP3 recording of the whole session. Although you can’t see the Scout video, you CAN hear the audio of it - albeit a little muffled. Skip forward to about 43:00. They play it again a little later in as well.

There is a separate write up just on the Meet The Scout video as well.

“Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother…I hurt people.”

There seems to be a lot of Heavy abuse by the sounds of all the screaming.

I checked the email this morning, and an anonymous source at Valve has mailed a few ideas that they’ve been working on at various points (that unfortunately have been dropped now).

Wow, seems not everyone at Valve hates me yet, despite me calling Gabe Newell “Chief hate monger, and corrupter of innocence”, and calling for everyone associated with Valve to be imprisoned a few posts back. I cross posted that one on the official Valve TF2 forums, but it got deleted after about 5 minutes. Seems the heavy word has come down from the top.

It was a joke guys.

Anyway, I’m sure everyone has heard by now about the new map “Goldrush” coming out for TF2. I thought about posting it as a news item, but then I figured that it was announced as a popup news item on Steam and the only people in the world didn’t know about it already don’t play TF2 and certainly don’t read this site (not that this fact stopped the blogosphere echo chamber).

This email doesn’t specifically contain any new info on the Goldrush game mode, but it does talk about a few ideas that were explored at Valve that never saw the light of day during its development. Its always interesting to get an insight into their game development process.

From: <removed to protect the innocent>@valvesoftware.com
To: madlep@ubercharged.net
Subject: Unreleased TF2 Design Concepts

Hey madlep

Here’s a bit of insider gossip for you from Valve. During our design process, we come up with a lot of cool ideas (and a lot of not so cool ones…). Some of which get included, some of which don’t.

Here’s a few of the more “out there” ideas we’ve had for TF2 while designing the new Gold Rush game mode. Thought you might be interested in them

TF2 Video Hero

With Guitar Hero and Rock Band being the latest gaming crazes, we were interested in introducing a similar play mechanic into TF2. We brainstormed some ideas for a bit, and came up with the idea of doing something with music videos.

The basic idea was to recreate some famous videos in TF2. Players would get points for how closely they replicated the timing and patterns of the events in the videos (kind of like the music games, except with actions and positioning in the map).

We didn’t get too far on this. Although the Orange Box has been a great seller, we didn’t have an unlimited budget for the new game mode. And this kind of game means licensing music and videos (which don’t come cheap!). This meant we were pretty much limited to a company that packaged a “golden hits of the 70s and 80s” license. I think it usually only gets sold on discount karaoke machines.

It was mostly all pretty week, but there was some decent Queen and David Bowie stuff in there that the older guys liked. Here’s some of the in game shots we did with it:

TF2 Does David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes

TF2 Does Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody

The Portal guys were helping out with the design on this one. They are all a bunch of young kids who are into that emo crap, and they weren’t so keen on the old fogy music. They’ve got a lot of design sway after Portal has done so well, so that stopped progress on that one.

Drunken Demoman Escort

This is the game mode that is the closest in spirit to the way Gold Rush is shaping up. The basic concept is the same (escort a slow moving object etc), but the premise is somewhat different:

The BLU TF2 crew has had a big night out on the town. It’s 3am, and they haven’t been able to find a taxi. So they decide to walk it home. The demoman has been on the sauce a little more than the other guys (as usual), and he’s not in good shape. The blue team must prop him up and help him to walk home.

Basic game play breaks down as follows:

• The more BLU players that are around him, the quicker he is able to move.
• If you get enough, you can even carry him for a speed bonus
• However, if there are no BLU players escorting him, he lays down in a gutter and goes to sleep.
• If there are any RED players around, the demoman will stop moving, and will begin to yell obscenities at them.
• If he is alone for too long, he may choke on his own vomit. If this happens, the BLU medic has a limited amount of time (a couple of minutes) to revive him and the team carries on.

We came up with this one Friday night over (more than a few) beers, and were all quite excited about it. However, when the play testers sat down to try it, they didn’t like it so much (although they did like the gameplay). We also played it sober, and realized it was only funny when we were all trashed. So we sat down and polished it up into Gold Rush (which we’re pretty happy with by now!)

Airport Security

We’ve got a few guys on the team who are (or were) big into Counter Strike. We all remember playing that map with the airport and the 747, and wanted to try something similar with TF2.

We played around with a few ideas, and came up with the idea of an airport security rush mode:

• BLU team plays as the passengers, and have a minimum 3 hours to board their flight.
• RED team plays as airport security staff. Their job is to stop the BLU team from boarding their plane and/or make the process as unpleasant as possible.
• RED team’s secondary task is to stop the blue team smuggling weapons or other dangerous devices onto the plane. However this is optional, and the RED team won’t be penalized at all if they fail at this.
• The RED team can arbitrarily change the game rules during play to slow and frustrate the BLU team. Some examples:
  • Decide to ban liquids
  • Require an extra form of identification that doesn’t exist
  • Strip search random players
  • Randomly evacuate the terminal area
  • Maintain a watch list of banned players, and refuse entry to the server. Players may be added to the list with little or no reason, and players cannot find out if they are on the list, or remove themselves from it once on.
  • Randomly close check in counters, and security lines - causing players to have to start queuing all over in another line
  • Force players to unpack everything to search
• To make things a little easier for the BLU team, any team member can dress up as a RED player (not just spies), and pose as airport security staff. These players won’t undergo any security checks at all and can pretty much walk around and do what they want.
• Additional achievements would be added for this game type. Players that have played a certain number of games would be eligible to join the business club program. This would allow you to skip to the front on some lines, and then access separate, exclusive waiting areas with better pickup items once you get past security.

The programmers loved this one. They had all this cool dynamically structured game logic that could be coded by the users in real time in the game using a scripting language based on legalese.

We were thinking of setting up in-game duty free stores where players could buy virtual in-game merchandise. The businesses we were looking at partnering with were quite excited about the prospect of players stuck in one place behind security for 3 hours with nothing to do but spend money on their stuff.

However, once again, our playtesters realized that it was crap to play. No, actually, they all enjoyed playing as the security staff. Its just that it was universally unpleasant to play as the passenger team. So ultimately that one got dropped as well. I heard some playtesters got so pissed off with the whole process they just when and played Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon instead - which gave us our next idea…

Crowded Commuter Train Trip

This idea was somewhat similar to the airport security game mode.

The basic idea is that the BLU team has to board a train, and travel to a specified destination.

Sounds easy? Not when you add some interesting obstacles provided by the RED team into the mix:

• Trains randomly canceled
• Trains turn up late
• Excessive crowding. BLU passengers will struggle to board any given train that arrives. The RED train controller team can chain together combos of late and canceled trains for crowding bonuses (this is inspired by the critical rockets already in TF2).
• Some services will mysteriously end up at a totally different destination. Passengers don’t get notified until it is too late to get off and change to a correct train
• RED players can fine players with feet on seats. Griefer players who use offensive language over voice comms can also be fined
• Some maps will require players to connect a bus trip with a train trip to reach their destination due to poor coverage of the rail network. The RED team can mess with how these connect, causing the BLU passengers to be further delayed
• Climate control on the trains will be the opposite of what is required - air conditioner will be off on hot days, and set to full on cold days

Another one where the RED team had a ball during play testing. We implemented this whole controller interface where you could switch tracks etc around with real levers. Heaps of fun. However the BLU team still wasn’t so keen on it. So we shelved that idea as well.

Anyway,

hope this stuff is kinda interesting. Feel free to post this on ubercharged.net, but don’t mention my name. (Doug Lombardi would murder me )

Cheers from <removed to protect the innocent>

Yup. Definitely some interesting stuff in there. I kinda wish they had the drunken demoman now