Well the update went live a couple of days ago and I got a chance to fiddle with a few of the new items, and additional things of interest. here is the last of my word vomit posts on the update.

Free for everyone forever.

One of the biggest pieces of news is that Team Fortress 2 is officially free to play, forever. If you didn’t already own a copy, you’re able to download and play to your hearts content. Free accounts will differ to “Premium” accounts, that status going to players who paid for the game, or buy an item in the Mann Co. Store.
While free players can play the entire game and not notice anything out of the ordinary, they lack certain features present for normal players. They get less backpack space, don’t get rare or hat-related items in their item drops, can’t trade and can’t craft as many items.
As an added bonus for paid users, everyone who owned the game prior to the Über Update received a hat called the Proof of Purchase, which is a nice little incentive.

Finally, you get to Meet The Medic.

Here he is. It is worth watching a million times.

Revamped Menus.

The menu has undergone a new makeover for this new era of the game. There is now a new game matchup system in which you choose your preferred game mode and the game matches you to the server it thinks is best.

The crafting system has been made over as well, and now you select what you wish to craft and put the required items into the specified slots. It’s easier in that we know all the recipes for items right off the bat, but it feels really messy in comparison to the original method.

New taunts!

With the addition of the Director’s Vision taunt, it was only going to be a matter of time before taunts were to be sold in game. Well with this update we’ve received two purchasable taunts. They’re rather simple ones, one called Meet The Medic which looks BEAUTIFUL, and an all class taunt called the Schadenfreude, which has the class laughing out loud at their opponent.

Strange items.

In the latest series of crates, players have the chance to discover “Strange” versions of other items. These weapons have no extra traits, but track kills made with them. At certain numbers of kills, the weapon goes up in ranking and it’s name changes. For example, hitting 10 kills with a Strange Eyelander causes it to be renamed Unremarkable Eyelander. These rankings hold no real purpose except bragging rights, but it’s nifty.

The Clinical Trial.

The Medic is the last class to get a set, and it’s a very nice one. The first item is one that has been tested in the Beta for a while alongside the Detonator and has finally seen a real game release. The Quick Fix is a new Medigun that heals and loads ubercharge faster than normal (40% and 25% respectively) and allows the Medic to run as fast as any class he’s healing.
The Ubercharge on the Quick Fix doesn’t give invulnerability, instead it triples the speed of healing and anything that “impairs movement” such as the Sandman’s bonk effect is ineffective.
There is only one negative, and that is that you can’t over-heal your target. This is an interesting and rather major downside for someone like myself who likes to over-heal everyone he can to give them maximum advantage. This seems like a situational item, like the Kritzkrieg, because in the end invulnerability is more useful that quicker healing in more situations.

The Overdose is a new needle gun for the Medic. It’s relatively simple and gives incentive to bring out the Medigun. The gun does 10% less damage than the traditional Needle Gun, but gives a speed bonus depending on how much Ubercharge has been charged up (Capped at 10%).
I can see the speed bonus being useful in a situation where your healing target just died and you need to make a hasty retreat, but apart from that I don’t see any particular incentive to use this weapon.

Finally, the Medic gets an interesting item called The Solemn Vow. This is an interesting melee weapon -which requires 8 Jarate to craft!- that allows the Medic to see the health of enemy players. This opens up a whole new level of strategy, as he’d be able to communicate such important information to his own teammates, and make good decisions on who to target.
It worries me that this is yet another melee weapon for the Medic with no actual downside. I’m sure there’s one i just can’t see right now, but it seems too good to be true.

Final thoughts.

While I’m extremely disappointed to see the Engineer get absolutely no love in this update, I’m still liking everything that has been added. I just hope they have a Neglected Class Update where they give the Engineer a heap of items.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to get enough Jarate to craft a Solemn Vow.

The third day of The Über Update has revealed something unexpected; two packs for the same class, and one new weapon for the Pyro. Additionally, they’ve claimed that “We only left out the Engineer”, worrying me that while there is obviously incoming Medic items tomorrow, there will not be any for the Engineer. I don’t like the sound of that, as the Engineer hasn’t gotten a set of items that come with a set bonus either. It seems like he is constantly missing out.

The General’s Formals.

This is definitely the more interesting set to me. The first item in the two piece set is a pair of boots called The Mantreads. They give the Soldier a 75% resistance to “push force taken from damage”, which I assume is specifically tailored to the push generated by the Scout’s Force-A-Nature, and possibly explosives. Additionally, any player you deal damage to by landing on them is tripled.
I see this as a good and bad thing. On one hand it’ll reduce the chance of being thrown into an environmental death or similar, and allow you to control yourself better. On the other hand, since the Mantread-equipped soldier won’t be launched far from where he’s hit, the enemy has a better chance of hitting him and killing him. Additionally, this sounds like it will be impossible to rocket jump. That and the lack of a less-passive secondary item are both pretty big negatives that will probably be enough to keep me sticking with the shotgun.

The Disciplinary Action is the first Soldier specific melee item since the Equalizer in his class update eighteen months ago. It’s abilities are very interesting and team oriented. While this item, which is appropriately modelled as a riding crop, does 25% less damage than stock melee weapons, it gives a speed boost to both the player and whatever teammate is struck with the weapon.
It sounds like a good idea, and I hope to get whipped by plenty of friendly soldiers in future games. Winky face.

Airborne Armaments.

There are many Soldier players who are nothing but amazing with their arsenal. This seems to be a set of weapons to cater to those. To start things off, The Liberty Launcher is a new rocket launcher that has only 3 rockets per clip, but fires those rockets 40% faster.
This rocket launcher makes me think of the Direct Hit, which had 80% faster speed. This new weapon is slower but still has splash damage, which will probably result in it being a popular choice.

To accompany this launcher is The Reserve Shooter, a shotgun built specifically to work with a Rocket Launcher. Half the clip size is lost in exchange for a slightly faster weapon switch. The best thing is that for the first three seconds after switching weapons to The Reserve Shooter, any targets shot that are in the air will take mini-critical damage.
The obvious scenarios where this is perfect is against enemies thrown up into the air by rockets, or the scout double (and I guess now triple jumping) to dodge. It’s going to be interesting encountering Soldiers who use this effectively.

Finally, the second melee weapon the soldier gets in this update is The Market Gardener. It’s a shovel that deals out no random critical hits, instead dealing out guaranteed critical hits when rocket jumping.
It’s obvious when this weapon would be effective, but I’m expecting Soldiers to take advantage of the The Rocket Jumper.

DETONATOR.

The Pyro gets one whole weapon in the form of the Detonator. It’s been in the beta for awhile but is finally getting a proper release. It’s a Flare Gun variation that allows the player to remotely detonate and explode the flare in mid flight. When the flare explodes it will light up any enemies in range.
The best part which excites Pyro players, is that it can be used to flare jump. If a Pyro jumps, and shoots and detonates a flare below him, he’ll get extra height. This means he will now be able to reach places he was previously unable to. It is a great day for players like myself who main Pyro.

I cannot wait for tomorrow.

Day two of the The Über Update comes with a little less news than yesterday, and some of it actually disappointed me. Today we got a look at a weapon pack for the Demoman, Scout, and a pack for the Sniper.

Lawrence of Australia.

The Sniper’s pack only has two weapons in it, and I can see them getting used a lot. The Sniper Rifle replacement goes by the name of The Bazaar Bargain is perfect for those douchebag Snipers who insist anyone who doesn’t headshot every kill is a shit player. For “each consecutive headshot” the Sniper is rewarded with an extra ten “charge per second”. If he body shots the bonus is reduced, and if the player is so bad he misses entirely, he forfeits the bonus. Additionally, the rifle has a charge rate that starts off at -20 of the normal rate. It’s obviously built for Snipers who are good at aiming, but it also to me screams that I’m going to have a harder time with that minority of people who insist on aim botting.

The Sniper also gets what I see as his version of the Equalizer. The Shahanshah -a name that is going to be a bitch to write in in-game chat- is a new melee sword that does more damage when the Sniper is at lower health, and less at higher health. I don’t think I’ll be using it over my Tribalman’s Shiv, but it might have a situational use for me when I’m using the Huntsman as an offensive Sniper.

One Thousand And One Demoknights.

Rage. That is the one thing I get from the preview for the Demoman’s pack. Complete and utter rage. When the Demoman first got his class update with the Eyelander and Chargin Targe, everyone hated it for how impossibly hard it seemed to be to defeat. With this set it seems obvious that Valve is pushing the Demoknight play style. As a secondary replacement, we see a variation of the Chargin Targe called The Splendid Screen. It has half the fire and explosive damage resistance of the former shield, but is in turn able to deliver charge damage from any range (The Chargin Targe only caused damage at the maximum distance), and that damage is increased by 70%. God damn it.

To help this, the Demoman also gets a new sword that doubles the speed of the charge’s recharge rate. Furthermore, The Persian Persuader makes all ammo that is collected be treated as health. I’m not sure exactly how fast the recharge speed will be now, but I can see this ability being used to charge out of battle, grab whatever pickup is available (Medkit, ammo, even a fallen weapon), and charge straight back into battle. Fuck.

Finally, the ultimate finisher, is Ali Baba’s Wee Booties. With Demoknights, if you knew what you were doing you could dodge and avoid them. These shoes give the Demoman more health -not that he fucking needs it- and gives him more turning control while charging, which means if you think you’ve dodged him; think a-fucking-gain.

All I get from this set is, “Hey bro, you’re completely fucked”. I am so glad I’m a compression blast spamming pyro.

The #1 Fan.

Well this would be the set that interests me most so far. The Soda Popper is a new Scattergun that works similar to the Force-A-Nature, but with the exciting twist that running around charges up a “Hype meter”, that when full allows the player to blow people away with mini-crits. I can see this being combined with an ubercharge during setup to devastate the opponent when the gates open.

The Winger is thankfully NOT a liquid secondary, but a new pistol replacement. It’s also a very simple one at that, with simply an increase in damage done at the sacrifice of clip size. Seems decent, but we’ll have to see how effective it really is as a pistol alternative.

The Atomizer actually carries a feature in big letters that says “Grants Triple Jump”, which both excites and worries me.  In one way, it will be very fun to play with, but on the other end i can see it breaking maps, especially if it works with the FaN’s knockback to allow a quadruple jump. Shit will get real, and it will most likely get balanced some more, even with it’s 30% slower attack speed and 20% less damage.
The weapon also states it does 10 damage, but whether this is to the player, or to an enemy you jump on is unclear, and will probably remain so until the update goes live.

Random is random.

I don’t know what to feel about these weapons. While some are interesting and I love the Scout’s additions, I can’t help but worry that they’re going to break the game in some respects and make things less fun. I can only hope this trend doesn’t continue tomorrow. How do you feel about the sets so far? You’re not going to comment? OKAY!

Today marks day one of the first multi-day Team Fortress 2 update since The Engineer Update, so there’s a very obvious tingle of excitement in my groin. Entitled The Über Update, the TF2 Blog describes it as ‘the biggest, most ambitious update in the history of Team Fortress 2’.
Today’s preview of the game update, which comes out on Thursday, featured not only that the game was going to be free to play for the whole week, but that an anticipated map is being released, new weapons for the Spy and Heavy, and a certain video that has been heavily hinted at for while.

First the obvious.

The TF2 Team have been hinting at it for awhile, but now it’s been spelled out for us; we are going to finally get Meet The Medic with this update. This is a momentous thing, as the last Meet The Team video was released just over two years ago. Given Valve’s sense of humour and the quality of previous videos, this will be nothing short of amazing.

PL_BarnBlitz

A map that was first discovered a while ago and speculated about has finally been confirmed and about to be released. Not much is really known about it apart from the above screenshot preview from today’s update, but given the quality of most Valve maps, this should be a fun one to play, and hopefully gets some attention on servers.

Black Market Business

These are almost definitely not the only items to be added in this update, but for now we only have information about the Heavy’s and Spy’s additions. First, the Heavy’s weapon set, entitled Black Market Business.
The Tomislav is a new Minigun replacement that spins up 75% faster and quieter than it’s alternatives, but at the sacrifice of a fifth of the firing speed. The idea seems to be a weapon for Heavy players who prefer to sneak up on their enemies, or like me refer to hide around corners and ambush players silly enough to try and sneak into my base.
The Heavy finally gets a new secondary that isn’t edible. The Family Business is a shotgun with relatively simple changes in an increased clip size at the sacrifice of a mere 15% damage. This excites me, and the gun looks pretty neat too. This looks set to overcome the Sandvich as my go to secondary of choice, as I prefer to have a fall-back weapon rather than a light snack.
Finally, keeping with the Italian Mafia theme, the Heavy’s final item is a set of brass knuckles given the really cool name The Eviction Notice. While they do only 40% of the damage of the Heavy’s normal melee damage (Which will probably be enough to keep a lot of players away from them), they allow the Heavy to punch 50% faster. Does this make up for it? I’m not particularly sure, nor am I really sure where this would be useful instead of the traditional Fists or the Killing Gloves of Boxing. They might find a use in Medieval, but apart from that we can only wait and find out.

The Man of Honour.

The Spy gets some weapons with abilities, that if were allowed to be combined with The Saharan Spy set, we’d all be screwed forever. As it stands though, he can’t, so we’re safe once more thanks to me.
Of course, being that the spy only has two actual weapons in his arsenal, one of his three items is a cosmetic item. The Made Man is a simple rose that the Spy wears on his suit. It actually looks really good and suits the class.
When it comes to actual weapons the Spy gets The Enforcer; a revolver that reuses the negative given to the Saharan Spy set. Along with that 0.5 seconds longer to cloak, the revolver also packs an addition 20% of firepower. This will probably be the item that I’ll go to in the presence of Razorback Snipers, but otherwise I’ll stick with my Big Kill/Traditional Revolver. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that that half a second extra that it takes to cloak is often the decider that gets me killed.
Replacing the Spy’s stabby thing is The Big Earner, which is a knife that will make me hate players that wield the Dead Ringer all the more. While it takes off 25 health from the user’s maximum, a successful kill will give them back almost a third of their total cloak instantly. This is obviously built for use with the traditional Invisi-watch, and especially the Dead Ringer. I guess I’ll have to be extra vigilant as a Pyro now.

Oooh excitement!

In the updates of old, this amount of content would of been all we got, spread through the entire three or four days. To see so much revealed on day one means big things. I can’t wait.

One of the big things to attract players to use the replay function is the rewards; upon the successful completion of certain achievements, the player is rewarded with an item. If one of your replayed videos hits 1000 views on YouTube you are given an achievement AND rewarded with a hat.
If you spend long enough editing your replays, the Star Of My Own Show achievement gets unlocked, and the Director’s Vision unlocks. This is a funny taunt you can equip to a class, and press the Action Key (Defaults to ‘O’) to activate the taunt, which you can see in action below.

My point, because I do have one.

Now this is neat, but it brings me to the big thought on my mind. One of the only things that separate the Mann  Co. Store from the Robot Enrichment store in Portal 2 is that you can buy taunts for the co-op robots called “Gestures”. Team Fortress 2, up until now, has not had equipable taunts. With the introduction of the Director’s Vision, I can’t help but wonder if there will be more in the future. The most logical step is that Valve will start selling them in the store and maybe have them in the occasional crates.
I can see them being sold for maybe five or ten dollars. I think it’s a great idea, as it adds further optional customization, and if there’s a particularly good taunt in the store for say, the Pyro, I wouldn’t mind shelling out five dollars for it.
While it may be a good idea, the problem will be the community. Half of the Steam Powered User Forums will bitch and complain about how it should be free, forgetting that they don’t even matter. b00bies from KritzKast will adamantly cry “macro transactions”, and people like myself will stubbornly defend Valve’s decision.

However it may all pan out, this is the beginning of something new for Team Fortress 2, and while this is all speculation, it’s fair to say it is pretty likely we’ll see more “unlockable” taunts in the future.

I’ve played with the Replay feature in the TF2 Beta before, but as of today the Replay Update officially went live on the official game, complete with new items, achievements and of course, a film making competition.

This is my first video fiddling with the official Replay feature, and I couldn’t help but notice that while in the Beta it seemed relatively polished and nice, in the official update I either experienced frequent jumps where the game would hang for me, or the replay just plain wouldn’t record/download. That being said, I expect these problems will be ironed out in the coming week, and everything will work well.

In this video, I play a Heavy on Dustbowl wielding the Iron Curtain, Fishcake and Fists. I felt I did rather well, capping the first point and clearing out the final control point. My only real regret was taking the risk of eating the Fishcake on the last point, when the Sniper comes over and penetrates my face with his…arrow.
Unlike my previous times with Replay, I took a little bit of time to fiddle with the different cameras you can use. While the game plays in first person perspective, you’re able to “record” from third person, and from “free camera” (the latter of which I do at the end to hover above my death.). Not only that, but you are able to record from the perspective of all teammates and enemies, allowing you to create some interesting build up to a final shot. While I haven’t done anything tremendous with it, you can see my exploring it towards the end, when the camera starts following the Red Sniper.
I noticed I was unable to record enemies from a first person perspective; when I tried the final result was a recording of myself in first person instead. I assume this is a bug that will get fixed in the follow up update¹.

Unfortunately, as time goes on and I get used to this system, I’ll probably post more of these for you to put up with.

1. There is ALWAYS a follow up update.

As seems to always happen, TF2 got an update the very day after a major update. Following the first Community Contributions Update, we have a small update based around crafting. It focuses on two points;

• Updated the new community-built hats so they can be crafted
• Updated the Camera Beard and Medic Mask so they can be crafted as hats

So the first one is an obvious fix that I’m surprised wasn’t immediately implemented, I mean, so that means that the people who tried to craft the new hats yesterday (and there would be a few) had no chance of getting them even though they should of. But either way.

The second point is something we’ve been hoping for. Camera Beards, being changed from a hat to a “misc” item, now drops like a normal item. As such I have two of them, others will have more (some claim to have ten). So, being able to craft two of them into an actual hat is an awesome win for the people who bitch constantly.

Now we just need to be able to craft medals, and that might satisfy people. Are you going to craft your camera beards?

Today, Team Fortress 2 released it’s first update fuelled by the Contribute! site they set up a few months ago. In that update was a new melee weapon for the Pyro and Demoman, and a new secondary for the Heavy, and of course a variety of new hats.

Seeing the attributes the new weapons have, it’s clear they’re very situational, and to me more of a novelty than anything. The Homewrecker (Pyro melee weapon) for example, is able to destroy buildings relatively quickly, but has a 25% damage decrease against other players. As a primarily pyro player, I don’t run into a lot of cases where I’m able to get that close to a building to deal out melee hits, and if I can then I’m obviously being ubercharged. If I’m that close to a building though, it’s far easier to just destroy it with flames.

The update serves it’s purpose though, and shows that despite some pessimism, the quality of ideas being contributed by the community is actually pretty good. And as an added thought, Valve said that prior to the Engineer update, there would be one more non-bugfix update. Is this that update, and does that mean the Engineer update is next? I hate having to guess.

What do you think of the new items? If you haven’t seen them yet, Ubercharged.net has made a nice post today detailing all the items, with pictures!

The past couple of updates have been almost worthless one line updates, and there hasn’t been much point in reporting them at all. Today a new update came out that actually has one or two interesting elements; the best one for me being that they “fixed the Pyro not being able to deflect enemy flares”. As an avid pyro player, this is awesome for me. I always just figured that we weren’t meant to be able to reflect flares. Now that I know we can, games are going to be a lot more interesting when it’s pyro vs pyro.

Other changes were a bit more vague with the update simply saying “updated CTF_2Fort” and “updated CTF_Doublecross”. I’d really like to know just what they did to CTF_2Fort?

You can review all the changes here. What do you think was updated on the maps?

Update: A follow up update for the game was released today, and is too short to merit a whole new post. You can view these change(s) by clicking this particular link.

While we wait for The Passing to come out, the minor updates continue rolling out. This is my first update since purchasing the game (which shows how recently I bought the game), and it’s good to see Valve doesn’t just look after Team Fortress 2.

This update mainly concerned map fixes and the AI/Bots of both the Survivors and the Player Zombies (in Survival and related modes). There’s not really much in here that interested me or that I could really go into, apart from a minor buff the Tank received. Melee weapons have been reduced against the Tank to about half of it’s original effectiveness. I’m hoping this doesn’t make earning the achievement too hard.

You can see the rest of the changes here.