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gfuller23's Team Fortress 2 (PC)
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| [February 9, 2008 01:45:27 AM]
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GAMEPLAY:
I was right about this game, it DOES get a lot funner the more you play it. It's common knowledge -- winning is fun, losing is not. Even though all the classes are fantastically well balanced, that doesn't mean a thing until you have reached the average skill level. This game is very fun, but can get frustrating when you're playing against a team that you just can't seem to win against.
The classes add a new dynamic to the first person shooter genre -- for example, playing as a spy changes the feel of the entire game of first person shooter to a splinter cell-esque stealth game, where you attempt to convince your enemies that you are one of them and they should not attempt to blow you away just long enough for you to kill them instantly by stabbing them in the back. In fact, the first few times that I played as a spy I had to change classes because I felt too badly for disappointing the enemy team like that, a few times I disguised myself as a medic and it felt like my enemy really was counting on me to come through for them. Of course, this feeling of sorrow went away eventually and I came to really enjoy the spy class. The hardest part is to get them to not attack you, because you are unable to kill your teammates so they would lose nothing from simply blasting you in the back a few times to make sure that you are on their team.
DESIGN:
Team Fortress 2 is an exclusively multiplayer game -- there is no single player or tutorial option. When you start the game, you are presented with the same options that veteran players are, thus a beginning player is lacking in absolutely no in-game benefits that any other player would have on any normal server (players can host their own games on their own servers and add their own layer of rules onto the game, which could serve to give some players advantages over others). The core gameplay philosophy behind Team Fortress 2 is that, under normal during routine gameplay circumstance, the game is designed to place the most emphasis on skill, experience, and strategy, rewarding players not for playing the longest or even perhaps for putting the most energy into the game, but for making the right choices at the right time. Every class is nearly perfectly balanced, playing team fortress 2 is a lot like playing rock paper scissors with 9 objects and where all the items shoot bullets.
The focus of the gameplay is centered around everybody attempting to keep themselves alive and killing everybody of the opposite team, not so much on accomplishing the objective. The concept is that those who are the most effective at killing the other team and keeping themselves alive, are most likely to be able to accomplish the small task, and it does that pretty well.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 9th, 2008 at 23:11:14.
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| [February 8, 2008 04:04:01 PM]
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SUMMARY:
In Team Fortress 2, you can choose between one of nine different classes to play as in an attempt to kill the members of the opposite team while keeping the members of your team (most importantly yourself) alive, while attempting to accomplish some small task at the same time. Each of the nine classes has only a few possible actions, or as whitehead would say, verbs. At any time in the game, however, players are allowed to switch classes from the one they were currently playing to any of the others bar none, but in doing so they lose whatever they may have worked to accomplish while alive, such as their physical position (they must run back to the location they were at previously, from the closest safe zone).
Even though the majority of the game is focused and balanced around a player's ability to kill the other player, the way for one team to actually beat the other team in a level is centered around the small tasks that players are attempting to carry out during the relatively short period of time that they manage to stay alive. Some of these goals, like capture the flag, can be carried out simultaneously by both teams without them ever being encumbered by the other team until the game is over, allowing a pacifist version of the gameplay to degrade into a game of footrace. Others, like king of the hill, are designed to force players to fight each other over specific areas of contestion -- both teams cannot be winning at the same time, either one is winning and the other is losing, or they are both losing.
GAMEPLAY:
The graphics were fun and interesting, but this gamelog is not supposed to focus on that, so I will ignore it from this point on. When I first got into the game, I did not have fun at all. The classes that I chose and their nuances did not matter at all to me, no matter what class I chose I pretty much got blown away. It did not matter what kind of weapons I had and what kind of unique attacks I was able to use if I did not know what exactly these separate attacks could do for me. This game really could have benefited from a tutorial mode to slowly introduce me to the moves of each of the classes and showed me specific situations where I would want to use them. Instead, I was forced to teach myself in between periods of being blown up, which did not make my teammates happy with me.
Even though the game was incredibly un-fun at first, I had heard far too many positive reviews to give up at the game. Having played various first person shooters repeatedly before, I could tell that the game had great potential, and I just had to get used to the players and classes before I would be able to enjoy it. In the end, I ran around as both a medic and a heavy. As a medic, I would simply follow other players around healing them, watching what they did in certain situations, where they went on different maps, and attempting to learn everything I could about how I was supposed to react on different maps and as different classes. As a heavy, I simply ran around trying to kill as many people as I could. The heavy class gave me the benefit of a profound amount of health and armor, so that I could run around without as great a fear of being killed instantly, giving me more time to learn before being destroyed.
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gfuller23's Team Fortress 2 (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 7 February, 2008
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