Y TFC's the best

Blitzkrieger

(Team Fortress Classic is a total conversion for Half Life. It’s a team based (duh) game with a mixture of light, fast player classes and heavy, well-armed classes. Some classes also have special abilities like building automated sentry guns, blowing holes in walls, healing teammates and disguising yourself as an enemy class. Major game modes are listed below)

Y TFC pwns j00!

Well for starters; it's TEAM Fortress Classic. I’m starting with the assumption that online multiplayer games are better than any single player game. Nobody wants to be a billy-no-mates shooting some AI monkey. As soon as Doom came along and you could shoot your mates instead, all that paled in comparison. I mean shooting your best friend in the face? Brilliant. It’s a similar story with strategy games. It’s never a case of can you beat the AI on a level playing field – it’s can you beat the AI when he starts with 8 times more troops and half the production costs. If you can, it’s on to the next difficulty level where the AI has 12 times more troops, a quarter the production costs and you have to play with one hand on top of your head while hopping on one leg with a chicken feather up y……………you get the idea.

The point is, whatever satisfaction you get from beating the AI with the odds stacked against you in a single player game, it’s nothing compared to the elation from beating a really good human opponent.

I love deathmatch. I used to play HLDM (better not use too many acronyms – that’s Half Life Death Match) and Unreal Tournament. The fast, frenetic action was always a great buzz. When I played really well, I used to get so focused on the game, I’d block out everything else. People would come in to the room and say things and I wouldn’t hear them. It wasn’t that I was ignoring them – I really didn’t hear them. All I’d hear was the sounds from the game and all I’d see was the computer screen. Sometimes, at the end of a match I’d be sweating from the effort of concentration.

With my ping, I was always getting owned by someone. To this day I hate LPB snipers. [aside rant]The only thing worse than a n00b sniper is a good sniper. I want to play the freaking game not run around being target practice for some 10 year old. It has to be one of the most anti-social things in online gaming. If you want targets, go shoot a bot. If you want to play deathmatch, put down that pussy sniper rifle and come play.[/aside rant]

Playing online was a lot like advancing through the skill levels in Unreal Tournament in single player mode. The first time I met Loque with his perfect aim I lost badly. After a while my aim and reactions improved and it got close to a tie situation – sometimes he’d win by a small margin, sometimes I’d win by a small margin. If I came up behind him with a loaded rocket launcher I’d win. If he caught me out in the open with a sniper rifle he’d win. The match was won or lost in the 50-50 situations where we’d come face to face with mediocre weapons. At first he’d win every time with his superior aim, but gradually my reactions improved until I could perceive a small gap between when he’d see me and when he’d shoot. This was enough for me to start to dodge, so by the time his projectile reached where I’d been standing I was clear of the blast. We’re talking about fractions of a second, but after a while the time delay between when he’d see me and when he’d shoot seemed massive. It got to the point where I was getting off the first shot and beating Loque easily every time. I moved on to higher skill levels and the pattern repeated itself – first I’d lose badly, then improve until eventually I’d win easily. The same thing happens online. If I’m playing TFC against a LPB soldier who’s merely good, he needs some serious advantages to win. It’s like I know what he’s going to do before he does it.

The thing is, as much pleasure as I get from being a good player, from beating all comers and winning a match, it all gets boring really fast. I quickly start to wonder what’s the point? It’s the same maps over and over fighting the same people, doing the same things. After a while you want more.

What you want is a team based game. The second assumption I’m making is that team games are more fun than every man for himself deathmatch style games. And they are. It’s not just the social element of being a part of a team, or the heroics of rushing in all guns blazing to help out a teammate (a smug “np mate” is always fun if you kill at least three enemies that were on his back); it’s the tactics. It’s not like deathmatch where an imaginary John Virgo says “Kill as many b******ds as you can.” and you run around like a headless chicken spraying indiscriminate fire at anyone you see. For starters, your teammates get miffed if you constantly shoot them in the face. Once you have a team, you start to have bigger goals than killing as many as you can and covering yourself in glory. Once you have a team you have roles and objectives – attack and defend, advance and retreat.

For those who live in a cave, on Mars, with their eyes shut the major types of game are :

Capture The Flag. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Get to the enemy base, take their flag, bring it back to your capture point. It’s pretty basic but can be very tense. There’s maps that are hard to defend and maps that are very hard to defend. In TFC at least the attackers have a lot of options. They’ll rarely use brute force. Usually they’ll go for speed - trying to stun the attackers and get out fast.

Assault. One team defends a capture point and the other attacks. This is my favorite type of map but it’s very hard to get the balance right. It’s even harder to get teammates that will do anything but run blindly into enemy fire. I suppose cannon fodder have their uses…..

Hunted. The “bodyguards” must protect the VIP from the “assassins”. This usually involves walking his fat ass across the map while every building bristles with sniper rifles.

Domination. Both teams set out to capture a number of command points. You either get points for taking the cp, for holding the cp for a set amount of time or both. My favorite map atm is one of these : Warpath.

It’s a straight line domination style map where you have to capture all five cps in sequence. It’s completely different tactically to CTF and other domination style maps. The action is very fast and the tactical situation can change very quickly. This is why I love TFC so much. You could be a light class on the attack when suddenly the other team gets three fast command points and you find yourself the only player who can stop the enemy getting the last command point. The beauty of TFC is that you can do this. A light class like the medic has a chance against a soldier or even a hwguy in the hands of an experienced player. The classes individual advantages are balanced in a way that makes a one on one encounter much more interesting than a standard deathmatch. On the same map, if I’m a soldier and I’m trying to take a command point against two enemy soldiers, I can choose to try to take them both on, or I can rocket-jump past them to try to take the cp. It’s not just a game of numbers or how skilled you are at deathmatch – on warpath it’s always the team with the best tactics that wins.

There’s a shed load of other team-based games around too. I think TFC’s advantage over them is that it’s simpler. I’ve dabbled in Battlefield:1942 (hard to find a server that’s not laggy) and I find there’s too much stuff going on. The air element makes things especially difficult. I don’t know how many times I’ve been holding my own with a bazooka against a tank when some git drops a great big bomb on top of me. I’m by no means an expert at it, but I think even if you were your life expectancy would be fairly low. For me there’s too many players. In TFC it’s usually 8v8. In BF1942 you’ve 16 people on the other team in a variety of tanks, armored cars, planes, artillery, battleships, etc. out to get you. There’s just too many things happening to really understand what’s going on. I would like to see the clan scene and play in more organised games, but I still think it’d largely be random destruction and whoever has the biggest gun wins.

There was an article on this board before about TFC as a spectator sport. This is where I think TFC has Counter ****e beaten. The gist of the article was that TFC was easy to understand and the constant action made it fun to watch. It’s not like players have to sit out for five minutes (not always a bad thing) or some CT sniper spends ages waiting for a terrorist to peek out.

So in a nutshell……I think TFC’s simplicity, diversity, balance, tactics, action and variety of skills make it the best game in the world.

Roller Toaster

I think I took a wrong turn here and ended up in 1999...

Anyway I played TFC religiously up until that big 1.1.0.0 patch and haven't really gone back since. It was the first game I ever got involved with clan matches in and was the big thing before CS came along. I don't think I could ever go back to it now though since the community wasn't too hot the last few times I played about a year ago and I presume it's gotten worse. The HL2 version of this should tempt me back though. Why all the sudden love for a 5 year old mod?

Pugsley

Pfft, less of that CS nonsense, spoiling a lovely clean TFC thread, less of it heathen!

Moriarty

qwtf >> tfc

It'll be intresting to see what tf2 is like with hl2.

Dr_Teeth

Hello and welcome to 4 years ago. "I hate LPB snipers" ahahahahaa!!

n1ck

TFC sucks, end of story.

PrecariousNuts

Jesus, did it take you 5 years to type that or what?

PcP

Blitzkrieger wrote:

There’s a shed load of other team-based games around too. I think TFC’s advantage over them is that it’s simpler.

Excellent post. If you havn't already tried it, you should give Enemy Territory a shot - the reasons you give for why TFC's best are the same reasons I go back to ET over any other online shooter I've played. Decent class system + objective* based gameplay make it excellent team game. Takes a good bit longer to start getting the hang of (or took me a fair while longer than most other shooters anyway) but once you get it sussed there's no going back. bling bling bling = most satisfying game sounds evar

* proper objectives, none of this 'blow up this useless wooden box' CS crap.

SantaHoe

PcP wrote:

* proper objectives, none of this 'blow up this useless wooden box' CS crap.

Actually I think you're right...
I flew around in spectator mode a few times in CS... I checked inside those boxes you have to blow up... and there was NOTHING IN THEM.
Now I don't know if the terrorists and counter-terrorists know this, but it's all a sham... all those de_ missions you and your comrades died on were all foobar

I'm so sorry

Horsefumbler

what about nuke, where your blowing up missiles? or piranesi where your destroying sundials? THOUGHT ABOUT THAT?

Retr0gamer

'Mick forgot his casio and those damn terrorists have blown up the sundials. Those terrorists really know how to hit us hard. We're rightly fudged now.'

SantaHoe

Horsefumbler wrote:

what about nuke, where your blowing up missiles? or piranesi where your destroying sundials? THOUGHT ABOUT THAT?

Yep missiles were empty, the computers on prodigy were just painted on, and the sundials were a decoy... I mean freezing time by blowing up a sundial, how stupid are these guys?