heyheysg said:
Owyn_Merrilin said:
For me it's a combination of the variety, the balance, and the utter unrealism of it all. The game is almost as high mobility as the old arena shooters, and would be equally high if bunny hopping hadn't been taken out of the Orange Box version of the Source engine. Further, it has a playstyle for everyone, and each of those playstyles is a hard counter for another one. Is there an engie on the flag? Go demo, soldier, or spy, and take out his nest. Unhappy about that spy that keeps killing you? Go pyro and spycheck the crap out of everyone. I've played plenty of well balanced games, but I've never played one before that has such a strong sense of rock-paper-scissors, at least not in an FPS. It really is a unique game.
All that aside, it's not better than all other FPS games, just the vast majority of them. I've been playing a lot more of the older Battlefield games in the past couple of months than I have TF2, and they're different but I wouldn't say one or the other is objectively better. Stugeon's law may say that 90% of everything is crap, but there's so many FPS games out there that a fair few are really good.
So in terms of balance, there is something there that is obvious to the player. How come other FPS's don't seem to be able to do it? (The rock paper scissors thing).
And how is it that the OVERTIME always seem to come into 90% of the games I play?
That is pretty good balance
I'm responding both to this post and the one above it with this quote, so bear with me. The three games you mentioned,
Battlefield, CoD, and TF2, all have very different sorts of teamwork. In CoD, teamwork is really unnecessary, and is in fact
discouraged by the mechanics; grouping together is a bad thing when K/D is the main indicator of victory, and a single grenade can take out the entire team. None of the classes are a specific counter to much of anything; people generally make the best class they can with the weapons available, and try to get as many kills as possible.
In the
Battlefield games, at least
Battlefield 2, teamwork is absolutely necessary, but the form it takes is squads of six people, five of whom answer to the squad leader, and the sixth of whom answers to the commander. Orders trickle down from the commander, and the squads scramble to capture flags. A good squad leader can get his squad in and out of the spawn points, capturing them quickly and with minimal losses. The different classes can be used to counter specific things -- for example, every squad needs at least a couple player of the Anti Tank class, as well as a medic or two -- but they aren't quite as hard of a counter as the ones in TF2. The real power in the game is in the vehicles, and any class can use those.
As for TF2, my other post pretty much explained it. There's only so much any single class can do; a good team not only needs a decent spread of classes, it also needs members who recognize when to switch classes to counter something on the other team, as in the examples I mentioned. Unless
both teams are full of rambos, team work is an absolute must; if one team is working togther, and the other isn't, the team that doesn't work together will be steamrolled. The same can be said for
Battlefield, but not so much CoD.
As for the Overtime thing you mentioned, Overtime kicks in when the objective is partially captured by the team that would otherwise lose. For example, in a CP map, if the blue team has part of the final point captured, the game will go into overtime until they either cap it, or the meter runs out, and it goes completely back to red/uncapped. In a payload map, overtime lasts as long as there is someone from the attacking team on the cart. It's kind of an acknowledgment by the game that sometimes the the defending team has lost, even if the timer says they won.
To answer the last question, why the strategy in other games isn't as obvious as it is in TF2, I'm not sure. TF2 is almost RTS like in the way each unit counters another. In most FPS games, the differences in the overall abilities of the different classes -- if there even are different classes -- are minimal beyond what weapons they happen to be carrying. I can think of very few games that have classes as specific as the ones in TF2, and most of those are F2P games that came out after TF2.
