#Tf2 king of the hill free#

I just brought up two points that have relevance in the latter half of this entry. For some people, one level can become the crux of an entire game. IвЂ™ve never met anyone thatвЂ™s said they like 2Fort, on or offline, but IвЂ™m presuming thatвЂ™s because everyone who enjoys 2Fort is already in 2Fort all the time. Unfortunate for CTF, it doesnвЂ™t quite do that goal justice for the majority of the time. What Team Fortress has always revolved around is design that organically encourages and suggests team-work to enhance an experience. CTF is known for most often turning into a game of stalemate, and modified by player-behavior into improv-death matchВ mode. Through ValveвЂ™s various design diaries and playtesting, it is arguable that CTF is plausible in TF2 вЂ“ and that Valve considered it closely, but it doesnвЂ™t quite represent what TF2 does best much at all. Subjectivity plays aВ sizableВ role inВ discerningВ the kings of level design, but communities and players have voiced generously about the clash that CTF as a mode of play has with TF2вЂ™s class-based dynamics. Consider the now infamous map for Capture the Flag (CTF) mode, 2Fort, which stomps every other map in play-time with nearly 7000 hours. Valve records most every live-play statistic that could inform future designs and the results of ones already made, but why cite them? Are we simply trying to gauge which Team Fortress 2 map is the king of them all? Hardly. Note that the Payload mode didnвЂ™t appear until half a year after TF2вЂ™s initial launch, with Badwater cropping up then 4 months later. Goldrush sits at #2 clocking in near 4750 hours played among servers, with Badwater taking #5 just shy 1000 fewer hours, around 3750. Since then, Payload maps Goldrush and Badwater Basin quickly rose towards the upper echelons of most-played maps among the entire catalog, and Badwater quickly became one of my own personal favorites.

Rather than stand on one spot for a given amount of time, the player escorts a bomb through various checkpoints until it reaches the enemy base, decimating it as the payloadВ teetersВ into a pit of radioactive materials. All Valve really had to do was approach the idea of Control Points from a radically different standpoint, which was swapping the measurement of time with the measurement of distance. The introduction of Payload maps tugged on the heart-strings of Attack/Defend by taking the linear staged-checkpoint format where Red defends and Blu advances, but replace the points with one payload-bomb strapped/shoved into a mining cart. This mode set up capture points (checkpoints in a map that may switch hands between the вЂњREDвЂќ & вЂњBLUвЂќ teams until one team controls them all, which dictates win/lose conditions) in a way that positioned one team to defend their given points, while the other is afforded to obtain them all one-by-one, before time ran out. Technically, there was a third, a variation on Capture Points and the initial bread and butter of TF2: Attack/Defend. When TF2 originally launched with the Orange Box two autumns ago (10/17/07), it essentially came with two modes (which IвЂ™m defining by objective): Capture the Flag, and Capture Point. Over the course of its run the game has seen most additions in a major two-fold department: variety of game-mode, and the number of maps each game-mode can be played across.

#Tf2 king of the hill free#

ThereвЂ™s no mistake that amongst all this exposure itвЂ™s afforded me the chance to observe and comprehend the changes made to it by the developers at Valve, and mostly due to the additional content offered as free Downloadable-Content (DLC). ItвЂ™s a game thatвЂ™s yet to go sour over the two years IвЂ™ve played it on and off, binge and dabbled in, purged or built a map for. Almost every detail in the gameвЂ™s design and construction is done mainly to serve the satisfaction of those two objectives as one of nine class-based characters ranging from the peripheral jousts of the sniper and the spy, the ever-helpful teammate healing medic, to the abrasive war-cries of the hard-to-miss heavy-weapons guy (or Heavy, for short). Team Fortress 2 is a game that revolves around one of two main objectives: defend a fortress as a team, or breach a fortress as a team.