Team Fortress 2 ; A real alternative? › Erm, so where’s your argument exactly? (Finally!)

So now that you have a slight overview of the game and what it’s about, you’re probably wondering “What’s the point of this really long-winded article?” well, you’ve reached that point at last! Here goes.

This game lends itself to team-play. There is no one class that can dominate the entire team for every map and every situation. To achieve the most out of this game, (As a team in a competitive sense) players have to be able to adapt. The game lends itself to team-play even on a public server, the best way to get points/frags is to work together. The creators of this game have made each of the classes dependent on another and they’ve also given each class a weakness that only certain classes can exploit/expose. The makers have even added a feature where you get assists for killing people either through healing or damage, much like ET’s XP reward system.

For example, on his own, a Heavy is useless but if you put him together with a medic and an uber-charge, it’s the best offensive combination you can get in the game. Similarly, if an Engineer and Demoman team together, you have an incredibly strong defence. The classes teams use goes even further than that. If the defending team is made up of a great number of Snipers, the best thing to do would be to use Spies to take them out. The whole game is based on this team-play and ability to adapt and counter-punch any tactic the other team may use.

With these very strong class combinations that are always threatening either your defence or attack, we see a new element not entirely familiar to an ET. A massively, mobile-defence. It’s true in ET, if you look at Radar and the defending team has set up an east-radar parts defence, if those parts are then taken and captured, the Axis team then must quickly mobilize itself over to the west-radar parts and quickly come up with a new defence. However, if you compare this to TF2, the case can be said for each attack the defending team deflects.

A good TF2 team will setup a new defensive strategy after each attack, simply because if you use a constant defence, there are so many ways to punch through it as an attacking team. It takes seconds for a few member of a team to switch to a different class/setup that would be ideal for the example situation. With this in mind, the defending team need to have a vast majority of different plays/tactics to try and surprise the enemy, not letting them know what they will see when they come round the corner.

You could argue that this is nothing new and this has been happening since the beginning in ET but this is so much more apparent and needed in TF2 than in ET. In ET, someone might need to switch to a panzer to either spawn-camp the enemy or to remove an MG42 from a good position but in TF2, the vast majority of the team need to switch/adapt with maybe the exception of a Medic. It’s like Valve took the team-play ideas from ET and ran with them until they got onto an entirely different level.

For me, on a personal level, this makes the game open into a wide chasm of endless possibilities for the game. If you have the opportunity of playing 3 or more classes per map (Seriously) then surely, you could get so much more out of the game in terms of your own enjoyment?

Suddenly, if you think about TF2 in that way, the game opens up into so much more than anyone could imagine from it. With this new found sense of team-play and close combat action, you can suddenly release the promise and potential a game like this has for the common ET player. Sure, it’s not the same as ET or RTCW. Hell, we can kid ourselves all we want into thinking that beyond some grassy sun-kissed hill, there lies a holy “Mecca” we commonly call “RTCW2” but let’s face it, will there be anything like ET or even RTCW again?

When you present TF2 in this manner, (To me at least, you can make your own judgements) we have a real contender in terms of playing a game competitively for enjoyment. Whether the game will receive enough support from Valve to have major LAN events or online tournaments will remain to be seen but never the less, the foundations for a great team-play game are there, all that is needed now is for Valve to promote the game more with sponsorship and for it to get played by the masses, which will force them to make new maps and new content. If Valve or an independent Mod developer could see the competitive potential this game had, we may find ourselves with a “real alternative”.

Thanks for reading my article, I hope you had as much enjoyment reading it, as I had writing it. I did say that it was a pretty biased article but it’s just another way of thinking about TF2 that hasn’t really been talked about much on this site.

If you read it all kudos, it does tend to drag on a bit. I was going to add images instead of just providing a cheap link but it was more hassle than worth.

Thanks for reading.