In this new segment, I aim to introduce each TF2 class as an XCOM
soldier, complete with ranked abilities. Today, we're looking at the Medic. Hey, XCOM players! If you have any opinions about the balance on these abilities, let me know in the comments section. Now, I know the Support is basically a field medic unit, so I'm trying not to replicate that skillset too much here. Ironically, that means subverting their role as pure healers a little.
Medics are support units dedicated to keeping units alive and kicking on the field.
Squaddie Rank Ability: Overheal Adds an additional 2HP to the supported unit, +5% aim, +5% crit chance
Corporal Rank Ability 1: Medigun Medikits can now reach an additional two tiles.
Corporal Rank Ability 2: Sangfroid This Medic is not affected by the Fallen Comrades will penalty
Sergeant Rank Ability 1: Field Medic Allows Medics to carry 3 medkits
Sergeant Rank Ability 2: Defensive Confers +25% defense to this Medic
LieutenantAbility 1: Kritzkrieg Overheal now provides +3HP, +20% aim and +30% crit chance
Captain Rank Ability 1: Medical Expert Using a medikit no longer ends the turn. Limit 1 medkit use per turn.
Captain Rank Ability 2: Covering Fire Prevents reaction shots against dashing allies, deals 75% of the equipped weapon's base damage
Major Rank Ability:Reflecter Overheal now has a 25% chance of reflecting an opponent's attack back on it
Colonel Rank Ability 1: Recovery Medic recovers HP% while healing allies. HP is based on percentage healed + armor HP bonus.
Colonel Rank Ability 2: Zombify Medic can turn enemy corpse into melee-zombie with 4 HP. Process destroys corpse
In this segment, I aim to introduce each TF2 class as an XCOM soldier, complete with ranked abilities. Today, we're looking at the Engineer. Hey, XCOM players! If you have any opinions about the balance on these abilities, let me know in the comments section.
The Engineer is an area denial class, focused on manipulating the environment
Squaddie Rank Ability: Sentry Allows the Engineer to deploy a sentry once per mission. [Sentries share a weapon type with their engineer (conventional, laser or plasma) and deal equivalent damage minus one. They have 3 base HP and have 50% of their engineer's armor bonus.]
Corporal Rank Ability 1: Bulwark Allows the Engineer to construct Walls that confer 50% cover.
Corporal Rank Ability 2: Observant The Engineer takes Overwatch after other units. [Won't waste overwatch if another unit kills the target]
Sergeant Rank Ability 1: Hauling Packs up a sentry and allows it to be redeployed with its current health.
Sergeant Rank Ability 2: Wrangle
Lieutenant Sergeant Rank Ability 1: Sentry Suppression The Sentry will begin suppressing an enemy after attacking it.
Lieutenant Rank Ability 2: Reactive Elements Allows both the Engineer and the Sentryto take a reaction shot on an enemy attack.
Captain Rank Ability 1: Short Circuit Reduces enemy grenade and explosive damage by 50%.
Captain Rank Ability 2: Autoloader Switching to and using pistols will automatically reload primary weapons.
Major Rank Ability:Robot Hand The Engineer gains +1 HP and will not suffer from Battle Wound penalties
Colonel Rank Ability 1: CAVORITE Sentry Sentry gains Flight and Evasion. Can now travel between tile heights
Colonel Rank Ability 2: Minisentry Confers a Minisentry [Sentries share a weapon type with their engineer's pistol (conventional,
laser or plasma) and deal equivalent damage minus one. They have 3HP]
Recently I found a book of video game art (one of my favorite kinds of book) which featured a discussion about the art and artistry of Team Fortress 2. Having read interviews, presentation, and devnotes on much of it, I was already familiar with a lot of what went on, but it did something no resource I've used has: it identified Valve asset artist Eric Kirchmer as specifically responsible for the creation of the sentry gun. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I adore the sentry and I'm always looking out for more sentry gun designs. So I decided to contact Mr. Kirchmer and discuss the designs with him.
TF2 is famous for its incredibly long development cycle, yet I notice that the sketches for the sentry gun available on the TF2 artwork page are very similar to the final model. Did the sentry gun go through any earlier design stages?
TF2 went through lots of iterations over the course of many years, but
the design that was established came through in a fairly short period of
that development cycle post Half Life2. At that time, Valve was in
early development of the Source Film Maker tool and one of first
projects was an animated trailer introducing the TF2 team at a pretty
early stage of development.
One of the highlighted goals of the video was to show the Engineer
deploying a Sentry and have it blast a whole bunch of incoming Soldiers,
which was going to be pretty awesome, except we actually didn't have a
Sentry yet. So the Sentry design was conceived and realized in about a 2
week stretch leading up to the video launch, and after that we began
articulating and designing how its upgrade states would work. Prior to
that stage of the TF2 design there was many other incantations of the
Sentry design, but I don't really remember those because I don't think I
had been born yet ;)
During the long lead-up to the Engineer update, we saw the introduction
of the Repair Node and the Combat Mini-sentry. Were any other buildings
designed for that update? - Don't know an answer to this one
Were you responsible for designing any of the other iconic technology employed by the mercenaries? If so, which? What was the process there?
The design of the Sentry helped drive the design for the other buildable
devices, Dispenser, Teleporter etc and at the time we were developing a
visual language for all the TF2 class weapons. Iconically, the HWG
Minigun and the Pyros Flamethrower were really successful in supporting
the visual style unique to the TF2 universe.
What do you think of the Steam Workshop? As a Valve employee, are you entitled to submit designs through it, or to the profits that might entail if those designs are picked up?
The Steam Workshop is an awesome way for TF2 players to get their
designs into the hands of the rest of the community, and make money back
from it, and really supports the growth of TF2 as a community driven
product.
Your employee bio says you've worked on a number of other games for Valve. Which was your favorite? Are there any game assets you're especially proud of?
My all time favorite project to work on was Half Life2 mostly because it
was my first experience working on a video game and it was a wild ride.
Also I absolutely loved the game when it was released even after having
played it for endless hours in testing before release.
TF2 was also a huge favorite to work on, and a little known design
addition added to the game was in the German version of TF2, they can't
have blood or gibs when players die, so we put in a bunch of gibs when
players explode and it was all this gag stuff like a balloon poodle, an
old boot, a tin can, a rubber ducky etc, etc. It was like one of the
funniest design projects I've worked on.
So there you have it. A little bit of the design history about the sentry gun, and some cool information about one of the men involved in developing the game we all adore.
With the adaptation of the Quick Fix and later the TF-1968 standard Medigun onto battlefields around the Gravel Sea, TF Industries began expanding the research and development of notdeadium-powered healing coils in the interest of reducing the company's insurance premiums. Bedwetting pacifists also suggested that the technology could be used to heal sick people and preserve lives tragically cut short in the endless and seemingly pointless skirmishes between upstanding legitimate businesses in the area, but nobody could see the profit in it.
Much of this effort was directed towards discovering ways to increase the frequency and duration of the high-emission charges which made the mediguns particularly devastating in combat situations. Although it was well-known that something was accumulating inside the healing reactors, what it was, exactly, could not be determined since opening unvented reactors tended to vaporize unwary scientists, wary scientists, unwary chimpanzees, and nosy criminal investigators.
Then, while an unknown scientist was sawing into a mercenary to retrieve a lost watch, he noticed that the patient's organs glowed faintly. Upon further investigation, he discovered that the TF-1966 receiver antenna (used to draw medibeams to the correct patient on the battlefield) also emitted high-charge particles into the patient's bloodstream, irradiating his vital fluids. When a healing beam was attached to the patient, these particles (along with a small amount of evaporating bodily fluid) would travel back up the beam, through the emitter and into the reactor, where they would accumulate.
Ventilation of accumulated irradiated fluid was totally impossible until the reactor hit peak capacity. Several synthetics were tried, but they all failed miserably. Ultimately it was found that only irradiated fluids from human subjects could be used to artificially "seed" the reactor. When it was determined by legal that mercenaries could not be persuaded to lower their weapons long enough for fluids to be harvested, alternate solutions had to be sought.
The only populations where the fluid-irradiation levels were high enough was amongst TF Industry mercenaries, so finally development of field tools for collecting fluids from enemy mercenaries became the obvious tactic, leading to the development of the TF-M1 Extraction Needle, which was basically a horrifyingly large venipuncture needle. The needle, while effective, was ultimately superseded by the introduction of the much more useful TF-M2 Combination Extraction Needle/Bonesaw, also known as the "Ubersaw". The TF-M2 had the added benefit of being a necessary component in an intralumbar spinal tap, a highly effective harvesting method.
Almost immediately after I thought my idea well had run dry, I hit on something of an idea. A rhythmic melee weapon. Basically, the weapon charges on a timed charge bar. The bar fills up, and if you can land the hit just as the bar hits 100%, you get a bonus.
The initial idea was as a training weapon, one that somehow taught new players to time their swings properly, or taught them how to engage foes at melee range, by encouraging the bonus to happen as they're swinging, or if not a bonus, at least a little celebratory noise. That way, they'd know when they were connecting with a melee swing.
But then I thought that maybe it could be a gambling thing. The bar's 0-charge leaves the weapon at fifty percent, with 100-charge giving the weapon 150% damage. Alt-fire to choose the charge. Whatever you pick, that's your melee damage for ten seconds.
Or perhaps the bonus isn't damage. Maybe if you can land it just as an enemy is using a melee attack, you counter his attack and deal a crit--a karate weapon that's ideal for melee mode!
I've been a bit off lately. I haven't had any great ideas and there's nothing exceptional looking to come this way. Although I think TF2 is still one of the best games I have ever played, the compromise on the art style, the neverending expansion of meaningless noisy content, and the fact that my ancient computer cannot run the latest version has had me on the ropes.
I'm excited about the Vaccinator, I have to say, but even that hasn't been enough to inspire me lately. We'll see how things go after Christmas. Maybe new games will seek to inspire my tired brain, and I'll find some more stuff, locked down there in the content bowls deep under the surface.
Until then: if you're reading this, intrepid soul, send me your favorite SFM clips and items. I'm really feeling frazzed here and I could use the inspiration.
I really enjoy TF2, and I think it's starting to make people I play games with hate it. See, I did not play FPS games before I played TF2--well, I did, but it was a dabbling that I begrudgingly accepted while I hung out with people hungry for those fights. I certainly didn't enjoy FPS games at the time, and I still for the most part don't now, although they're much, much better.
However, TF2 has become my gold standard, and every time I play a new FPS, I'm astounded at the seemingly obvious design decisions laid out in TF2 that make everything else look like total rubbish. Recently I realized that I have never been teabagged in TF2, for example, and I realized this is because of two factors (well, maybe more). For one, TF2 has taunts, which are cooler than teabagging for just... so many reasons. I might have to watch a bit of Monday Night Combat to see if teabagging happens there, because it's the only other FPS I can think of that has taunting.
The second, and this is speculation on my part, is that TF2 has dominations. The game tells your victims when you're better than them. It even hangs a flag over your head that is designed to say "come at me, bro". I understand why it might not work in other games, games with smaller teams where often of course you know who's killing you, he's the only other guy on the map, or at least he's the only one that speaks with that particular Cold War accent.
Now, the absence of teabagging is no small thing to me; but the community feels less like a sack of soggy douchebags for it. Don't get me wrong, the TF2 community has its scumbags, just like anyone else, but it is so nice that they don't do that one thing.
Okay, so this wasn't the greatest discussion of why TF2 has better design principles than most FPS games. But thank Gabe there's no teabagging. Or Robin. Actually, I don't know who to thank.
