Team Fortress MegaBirthday Extravaganza - TF's History
— DieHard
Computer games today are all about the high polygon counts, multiplayer,
and the mods. Each
game seems to be bigger, better, and badder than the last. A half decade
ago, a 25 mb game
called Quake hit the shelves. Around the 24th of August a single player mod
for quake was
released. Only having five classes and no map support TF was unleashed onto
the world. Three
Aussies' had a diamond in the rough, they had no idea what impact this mod
would have on the
gaming industry.
Team Fortress, created by Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley, was
the first successful
team class mod. Since TF's creation five years ago, it started a new trend
in online gaming,
spawning several spin off games. Some of the sister mods include, Q3F, UnF,
and TFC; all of
them are great mods, but none of them can beat the original! Azm0 of Unf
was quoted as saying,
"The advantage of developing a Team Fortress based mod on any engine is
that you have a
proven formula as your starting point. Team Fortress for QuakeWorld was
the first and I don't
think anyone will mind me saying that it will always be the best."
Throughout the years TF players experienced major changes in the game. Back
in the day, the
detpak would kill everyone in site, regardless of the distance. The demoman
also could carry
three dets and was able to stack them. Clans used to stack dets in the
2fort4 sole flag entrance to
stop early scout rushes. In original TF, a scout would automatically stop
and try to disarm any
det he crossed over. Now in TFC, you must look down at the detpak.
In version 2.5, a tentative final version, TFS gave the engineer the
ability to build teleports. To
use the teleports, an engineer would have to build an entrance and an exit.
When two engineers
worked together they could build entrances and exits in the enemy base.
This would drastically
up the tempo of the game.
During the 2.5-2.7 version, changes were made to the pryo, namely his
damage was significantly
increased. The incendiary cannon's rockets traveled at the same speed of a
soldier's rocket. Back
then they only used one unit of ammo, unlike today where it uses three
units. In a nut shell the
pyro was on par with the soldier. During the 2.6 version, the pyro was made
to into how he is
now.
Once the pyro was dialed in, the Hwguy was the next class to be tinkered
with. Gudlyf did most
of the patch work at this point. The core of TFS now worked at Valve
software and focused their
attention toward TF2. The biggest change made to the Hwguy was his the increase of
erratic accuracy when firing overtime. Another major change in the hwguy's game play was that he could
no longer move
while firing. The final tweak to the hwguy was his invulnerability to be
bounced around by
concs, grenades, rockets, and pipes. The reason behind this was to keep the
hwguy on the ground
so he could keep fighting.
One of the other late changes in TF was the introduction of caltrops. TFS
originally wanted the
scout to carry caltrops, but were unsure how to code it. TFS went on
without the caltrop and
gave the scout a flash grenade. The flash blinded the victim with a white
screen that slowly
faded away. Unfortunately, players found a setting to over ride the
grenade's effects. Finally
when there were too many players cheating, the caltrop was finally added to
the game and the
flash grenade was removed.
The game has been evolving for five years. Clans like OSKI, Wolvesmoon,
BraveHeart, Fifth
Element and Clan Doomsday set the foundation. Sites like TF Newswire, ETF,
Keeg's Fortress,
Sycamore Tree, and CF TF delivered the news and announcements. There have
been great
people that help mold the community, people such as: Spaceman Spif, The
Hal, Deadpool2,
Scatterblak, Sentinel, Bundy, Gib Keeg, Betastorm, Dock, etc. From rocket
jumping to flag
capping, TF has provided countless hours of fun. From all the TF'ers out
there, I would like to
extend a heart felt THANK YOU to Robin, John and Ian. The mod you created
changed the face
of gaming forever, you will never be forgotten!
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