Hampster
August 24th, 2006, 02:25 PM
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=66973
Eurogamer: With Team Fortress 2, it seemed to take forever for you guys to even talk about the game. So firstly, why has it taken so long?
Doug Lombardi: Since Atlanta E3 in '99 when we first showed Team Fortress 2 as a very army-looking style game, there's been three iterations of the game that we built and sort of scrapped internally.
The most significant reason for that was the look and feel of the game, and sort of drifting from the look of the original Team Fortress. The gameplay in TF Classic and Team Fortress for Quake was sort of over the top rather than super realistic stuff and when we started to move down the army route all of a sudden it became really serious and quickly we realised we weren't building Team Fortress. And then at the same time Half-Life 2's development started kicking up and the Source Engine was born, and so that team said, "we're kind of headed down the wrong art-style path, and there's this great technology coming online that we want to take advantage of" so it was a natural shift there. And then we went down an interim art style and gameplay approach that varied as well from the roots of Team Fortress.
And we feel that now we've got something that's full of that true, over the top style, encouraging that style of play, but also one of the things we took into consideration was to give each class a visible identity if you will, a readable hierarchy so that if you're in combat you'll be able to tell from great distances whether or not it's a heavy you're about to deal with or a pyro - just from their silhouette - which is something we feel is very important to multiplayer games, and something we've always sort of beat ourselves up about with Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, where it's a little bit hard to tell people apart at a distance. And in those games perhaps it's not quite as important as it is in TFC, because those character classes are so defined and they're so specific that you're really going to want to tune your approach to those players differently than you would perhaps the different characters in Counter-Strike or other games.
Some more in the article. TF2 has been pushed back to Q1 2007 like that article states, Valve's aiming for February now. All this info is coming from the GC in Germany.
Eurogamer: With Team Fortress 2, it seemed to take forever for you guys to even talk about the game. So firstly, why has it taken so long?
Doug Lombardi: Since Atlanta E3 in '99 when we first showed Team Fortress 2 as a very army-looking style game, there's been three iterations of the game that we built and sort of scrapped internally.
The most significant reason for that was the look and feel of the game, and sort of drifting from the look of the original Team Fortress. The gameplay in TF Classic and Team Fortress for Quake was sort of over the top rather than super realistic stuff and when we started to move down the army route all of a sudden it became really serious and quickly we realised we weren't building Team Fortress. And then at the same time Half-Life 2's development started kicking up and the Source Engine was born, and so that team said, "we're kind of headed down the wrong art-style path, and there's this great technology coming online that we want to take advantage of" so it was a natural shift there. And then we went down an interim art style and gameplay approach that varied as well from the roots of Team Fortress.
And we feel that now we've got something that's full of that true, over the top style, encouraging that style of play, but also one of the things we took into consideration was to give each class a visible identity if you will, a readable hierarchy so that if you're in combat you'll be able to tell from great distances whether or not it's a heavy you're about to deal with or a pyro - just from their silhouette - which is something we feel is very important to multiplayer games, and something we've always sort of beat ourselves up about with Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, where it's a little bit hard to tell people apart at a distance. And in those games perhaps it's not quite as important as it is in TFC, because those character classes are so defined and they're so specific that you're really going to want to tune your approach to those players differently than you would perhaps the different characters in Counter-Strike or other games.
Some more in the article. TF2 has been pushed back to Q1 2007 like that article states, Valve's aiming for February now. All this info is coming from the GC in Germany.