=========================================================== By Kate Morris Published Febuary 24th, 2000 http://web.archive.org/web/20000520101156/http://www.3dnews.net/interviews/02_24_00_tf2.x =========================================================== 1. Will any of the "cheap tricks" used in TF (i.e. grenade and rocket jumping) be possible in TF2, or will people need to discover their own ways of bending the rules? Grenade and Rocket jumping aren't possible. I'm sure people will find obscure ways to bend the rules to their advantage. When over 100,000 people play your game online every day, every little nook and cranny of your game is found. 2. The main theme of TF2 seems to be teamwork and co-dependency - even weapons work better when two people are co-operating. With that in mind, how many people will need to be on a server for a good game to take place? Are the days of 5v5 scrims over? It really depends on the map, and we've tried to ensure we've got a nice mix of large and small maps. 5v5 scrims are definitely not over. You can even play the larger maps with a small number of people by using bots to fill out the teams. 3. One of the reasons the original Team Fortress was so popular was that it would run well on anything this side of a 486. Considering the inevitably higher system requirements of Team Fortress 2 and the fact that there are still people out there trying to play games on Pentiums, do you think TF2 will ever be as popular as its lower-tech, more accessible ancestor? One of the things we've tried hard to do with TF2 is to make as much of its technology as scalable as possible. One great example of this is the Multi Resolution Mesh (MRM) technology. MRM scales the models you see in the game to match your computer system. If your system is old, it'll scale down the amount of polygons used to make sure your system still runs well. On the other hand, if your computer is very powerful, it'll scale up the model as much as it can. The end result of this is that TF2 can still run on older systems, while still looking incredible on the newest systems. 4. What attempts are being made to balance the classes more? There's nothing worse than being in a public game in which two out of three players are snipers... TF Classic's design was done over a couple of years, where new classes were added over time, which made it hard to balance them well. TF2's classes have been designed from scratch, with the knowledge of all the other classes in the game, which makes balancing a lot easier. 5. How big do you expect the learning curve to be? TF2 is obviously going to be more than "run, shoot, kill, repeat," but will we need to play with one hand on the keyboard and one on the manual? One of the things we knew we wanted to do with TF2 was to make it easy to play, easy to learn, and yet still as rich as TF Classic, where players are still finding new tricks 4 years after it's conception. We knew we needed a hazard course, similar to Half-Life's, to teach people how to move, shoot, and the rest. But we also knew that wouldn't be enough. TF's classes give the game a depth we just can't explain in a single player game. TF2's training mode had to be in a multiplayer game. So the approach we've taken is similar to an AI helper. While you're playing the game, online with other players, its watching you and helping you out. It keeps track of what you do and don't know, and it tries to offer it's help at times when you want it. The key to it is that it only offers you information at a time that it's directly useful to you, so that you don't get swamped down with things you'll have to remember for later use. 6. What's the single feature in TF2 that you personally are the most excited about? Probably the training mode I described above. Or the Commander class, who essentially plays an RTS game, where the units are the other player's in the game. Or the Coach class, who's only job is to use voice communication to teach other players how to play the game. Or... there's just too many features I'm excited about. 7. The voice communication is an interesting addition... but how much bandwidth will it suck up? Will a cable modem or better be required for net play, or will us tin-can-and-string users be able to get in on the action too? Like MRM, we've tried to ensure we've got a nice scalable solution to our Voice technology. The better you bandwidth, the more voice we'll send to you. So if you're on a modem, you'll only get one voice at a time, and it'll be prioritized, so your Commander's voice would override others. At the other end of the scale, if you're on a LAN, we'll send you multiple voices at once. Having our voice technology in the game allows us to fit the voice stream around more important data. If you're in the middle of a firefight, and we need to send you lots of network data for that, we'll delay any incoming voice communication until you can handle it. 8. It must have been a tough decision, changing TF2 from a free addon for Half-Life to a full commercial game. Considering the improved quality associated with retail products, was it worth "selling out?" Will the experience really be that much better for the consumer? Definitely. We've been able to devote time and resources to TF2 that we would never have been able to if we were just an add-on. 9. Why use World War II as the background for TF2? What makes it better than modern military or science fiction weapons and environments? We're not aiming for WWII as much as we're just aiming for that generic war movie look that everyone knows. We do it because it's a great way of giving our players a chunk of knowledge about the game without us having to explain it. Everyone knows what a machine-gun does. Everyone knows what to do if they're driven up onto a beach in a landing craft. 10. The inclusion of bots for single player seems to be a standard feature in the so-called "multiplayer only" games... but the bot AI can sometimes be lacking. Will TF2's bots really be smart enough to handle the class system and teamwork required in the game? If so, they're smarter than most humans I know... It is an ambitious plan to support all the TF2 classes, but we wouldn't be happy with anything less. We learnt a lot about AI from our experiences with working on Half-Life's AI, and seeing how people responded to it. We're applying all that knowledge to TF2's Bot AI. 11. Since TF2 is a stand-alone game, will we be seeing any user-created modifications for it? Definitely. Half-Life is one of the most modifiable game engines out there right now, and the new SDK introduces even more features for mod-authors, such as an in-game mouse pointer that could be used to make an RTS or Diablo-like RPG, and MultiServer, a capability that allows modmakers to essentially have multiple games running on the same server at once, which could be used to run all the rounds in a a 16 player 1on1 tournament on one server, all at the same time. We've kept a close eye on the mod-makers, and we know what features they want to have. We're doing our best to make sure that when TF2 ships, they'll be able to do anything with it.