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Back when we launched the Propaganda contest, we originally figured it'd be a cakewalk to judge. You might not know this, as it's a well-kept industry secret, but normally with giveaway tie-in contests for video games, you get about 10 entries. Seven of these are virulently racist. The other two are pornography. The last one, regardless of its quality, wins by default.
However, the recession must be a lot worse than we thought, because apparently all of you are unemployed and have nothing better to do than spend real hours drawing incredibly time-consuming art for virtual prizes. No joke: as of contest's end last night, we have in excess of 11,000 entriesand almost every one of them deserves to be framed on the wall of one of Gabe Newell's castles.
In fact, while we've managed to wade through your mountain of entries carefully enough to select a first, second and third place winner below, we're nowhere near through categorizing our many favorites, and we've got plenty more prizes to give away. So just because you don't see your entry below, don't assume you haven't won anything. (Still, with 11,000 entries, don't bet against it, either.)
FIRST PRIZE
Customized In-Game Item
50,000 War Points to Soldier
"GIVE 'EM THE BOOT" by J.Axer's Dapper Topper
With some entries, we loved the art but didn't care for the slogan. Others had an awesome look, but didn't capture the spirit of a propaganda poster. Still others had a killer propaganda slogan, but not a heck of a lot else. "Give 'Em the Boot Right in the Fruit," on the other hand, is a triple threat: It's funny, it looks great, and it makes us want to kick a Demoman in an extremely precise area (that the bean counters won't let us mention because they're all such huge extremely precise areas).
SECOND PRIZE
Slightly Less Impressive Customized In-Game Item
25,000 War Points to Demoman
"THAT BLUE DEVIL" by Amber's Rad As All Hell Item
We liked this one because it looked like art and made us feel smarter every time we saw it. It says something profound about evil. It exists, and it's bad. Hold on, we need some back-up here. Let's get Jeremy Bennett in here to explain why we like it: "I appreciate the strong composition, coupled with the limited Prussian blue palette, accented by the spot red. It's reserved, yet sophisticateda first-rate homage to period propaganda." We agree.
THIRD PRIZE
Less-Impressive-Than-the-First-Two Customized In-Game Item
10,000 War Points to Soldier
"DO THE RIGHT THING" by John Freeman
The majority of the entries we received were pretty lighthearted, and that's what we liked about them. This one we liked for the opposite reason: it isn't funny. It's just legitimately bad-ass. We don't need any artists to tell us what's great about this one. Look at that guyhe just killed twelve dudes. With a shovel. We didn't think there was any way to make that not funny, but John Freeman somehow did it, and for that he gets third prize.
The in-game prizes these lucky winners will receive are being custom-designed for them as we type. We'll be sure to release images of them soon. And don't forgetthere'll be more winners (and more prizes) after the update.
Soldiers continue to hold the lead in the warbut like an M&M lodged up their collective noses, the Demoman refuses to melt away quietly. In other M&M-Stuck-Up-Drew-Wolf's-Nose metaphor news, the Soldier's lead remains thin as a candy coating. In fact, judging from our most recent numbers (4923531 Soldiers killed to 5056134 Demomen killed), the Demo actually seems to be closing the gap as the War hurtles to a close.
For all you conscientious objectors to the war, you can still make some postwar memories to tell your grandchildren, because Team Fortress 2 is having another free weekend starting Thursday night as soon as the update goes live (though you can start preloading now).
As for all you soldiers fighting the good fight in the trenches, only to find the Demo-controlled media back home painting you as incompetent monsters, this update's for you.
If there is a tragedy in war (besides all the killing), it is that there must be a loser. Currently, we all know who that loser is.
Drew Wolf, who still has a red Peanut M&M lodged so deeply up his nose that hospital doctors were unable to extract it. "It will probably melt after a while," they told me. (I had to drive him to the hospital.) "Maybe put his head under a heat lamp for a bit."
The other loser, of course, is the Demoman, who JUST SLIGHTLY trails the Soldier in overall kills. So tonight is the Demoman's update: no Soldier information whatsoever. New weapons? Read all about 'em. New comic? No Soldier to be seen.
Go get 'em, lads. This war ain't over yet.
The Soldier/Demo war has generated more email than any event in Team Fortress history. The number one question I'm being asked is "are you going to publish any new information over the weekend?" Absolutely we are. In fact, here's some news right now: As of THIS MOMENT, there is still an M&M lodged up TF artist Drew Wolf's nose. Drew's in the hospital, and the entire team's thoughts and prayers go out to that brave little peanut M&M. Well, have a great weekend everyone!
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A day later, the war rages on—the kill tally is, quite literally, in the millions, and the forums are alive with the sounds of people having good, friendly fun while hurling bitter, teary-eyed recrimination at one another.
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In the sixteen hours since war was declared between the Demoman and the Soldier, a whopping 2,681,005 kills (and counting) have been tallied. That's bloody astonishing! And it's all thanks to you! You should all be proud of yourselves!
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So: how is the War update different from our other class updates?
In many ways, it's not. Like any other class update, the War update will reveal three new weapons each for the Demoman and Soldier throughout the week, as well as some maps, achievements, and surprises, right up until the day of release, when everything we've been teasing goes live.
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Friendship ends in one day.
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TF2maps.net's Payload Race & A/D CTF Contest
What happens when you give some TF2 mappers six months to make a map? What happens if that map is payload race or a resurrected Team Fortress Classic game mode, Attack/Defend CTF? TF2maps.net decided to find out. Take 'em for a spin and place your votes!
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Those of you who pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 (PC)on Steam or at participating retailers now have exclusive access to the momentous event they said would never happen. For the first time in history, two separate Valve universes collide. That's right: it's a Left 4 Dead/Team Fortress crossover! This is not fan fiction! This is not a dream sequence! The characters from Team Fortress 2 will team-up with Bill's hat from Left 4 Dead 1!
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The good news is that yesterday's $2.50 sale saved the company. The bad news for our bean counters is that, as a "thank you" from all of us on the TF team, we're rolling back prices like it's Thursday. That's right — Team Fortress 2 is BACK ON SALE at its original, company-busting Thursday Super Sale of the Century price of just $2.49! But only until 1:00pm PDT! And this is the last time we're doing this! There will be no more sales!
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Remember yesterday when Team Fortress 2 was on sale for the ridiculous, mathematically-basically-zero price of $2.49? According to the bean counters, we're now broke. Man, what were we thinking? Anyway, in a desperate attempt to move some units, make up the shortfall, and save the company, TEAM FORTRESS 2 IS ON SALE FOR $2.50 UNTIL 7PM PDT! Pennies from Heaven!
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The Powers That Be have instructed me to pen another dispatch for you unfortunates. How many goddamn words do you people need? In my day you wrote just enough words to convey meaning: "Secure that damn hill." "I will have more sausages." "This man spoke trash and I strangled him." Today's writing is complicated and has to mean two things at the same time, or it won't win writing awards. Double intendreys. Metafores. If I meet the Billy Shakespeare who came up with that nancy-assed garbage, I will bury my war-foot so far up his ass it will be a foot and a half up his ass.
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From now until 2:00pm PDT, Team Fortress will be available on Steam for the horrifyingly (to our accountants) low price of $2.49! What else can you buy for that price? That's not a rhetorical question, we're interested in all the things we can buy once those $2.49s start rolling in.
Robin "Twofortyninenaire" Walker
Get Team Fortress 2 for yourself or treat a friend.
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At ease, you wastes of skin. The Powers That Be have commanded me to write another short missive—I'm told it will be broadcast on some manner of punch-card tube machine and read by the thin, stupid youth of today, who evidently ignored my past instructions to stop wasting their lives and do more push-ups.
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With work on Left 4 Dead 2 calming down for us a bit, we were able to finish up something we promised you a while back—gathering up all the source files for the character models and getting them online. This'll hopefully let you guys get a lot more creative out there with your fan-made content. (We can't wait to see it.)
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Patent Pending:
#1308 - "GUARD DOG"
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As with the first Left 4 Dead game, most of the TF2 team has moved over to help out Left 4 Dead 2 get through its final shipping steps. This time around, though, we've improved our process a little to ensure we can keep some people on TF2, enabling us to continue doing TF2 updates. We've been a bit slow on updating here, and there's plenty of stuff to talk about, so we might as well jump right in.
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Over the next few days we'll be removing all TF2 items that were earned using external idling applications. We're going to adopt a zero tolerance policy for external applications used to manipulate the persistent item system. Due to us not having a policy in place prior to today, this time we're only removing the items earned through cheating the system. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items. If you're interested, only about 4.5% of the players in TF2's community will be affected by this cleansing process. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items.
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We thought you might be interested in seeing some of the "behind the scenes" work that goes on in Team Fortress 2. The process usually starts with a team discussion: This helps us determine the goals of the map we're going to build. In this case, we wanted a game mode that had an intense, centralized experience with quick player turnaround. We liked some of the facets of Arena mode, but it was clear that many players don't like to wait for the next round to play.
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Go check it out, and keep your eyes peeled for goodies!
*Has probably already been done by someone in the TF2 community. Please don’t sue us.
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I would like to thank you for emailing us to point out that Viaduct is not the first TF2 map to feature snow. More importantly, I would like to thank you for stopping.
Immediately.
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The Classless Update continues to class up the joint with some previews, including a brand new game mode and some retooled classic maps. Check it out, then fire back on the forums.
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After setting a new standard for Lack of Class in an FPS with the addition of Jarate (the jar-based Karate), we've raised the bar on lowering the tone even further with the first ever Classless Update!
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We've been shirking our updating duties here, so we thought it'd be a good time to do some quick housekeeping:
At ease, you worthless sons of mothers!
I've been asked to present our internet blog-reading public with this handsome collection of avatars, which I'm told you can use on Steam. I don't mind telling you I have no idea what any of the words in that last sentence meant. This is the problem with the youth of today: too much time inventing nonsense words, not enough time taking a bullet in the lung defending a hill. I don't have to know what the hell twitters and texting and body sprays are to understand that they're not the sort of thing men should be engaged in. Like conversations, or painting things that aren't a house.
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Today we're releasing an update to the Source SDK that includes the .vmf source files for many of the official TF2 maps. This is something we've wanted to do for a while, especially as we've been growing the range of game modes in TF. Here's the list of maps that are included in the update: Lumberyard, Ravine, Badlands, Dustbowl, Granary, Gravelpit, 2Fort, Badwater, Goldrush, and Hydro.
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The men at TF2maps.net have devised some sort of box puzzle that they thought you'd enjoy. Let me clear this up right now: They are incorrect in this thinking. I have stared at this blasted thing all morning and I can't make heads or tails of it. This is the problem with today's youth, if you ask me. Spending all their time devising clever boxy word puzzles instead of doing something constructive, like pushups, or jumping on a live grenade, or sitting in a foxhole cradling a man in your arms and watching the blood run out of him and the life drain from his eyes, or sit-ups.
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First off, a quick note: We put so much stuff into this update that we didn't manage to cover it all on the internets before the update went live, so we made a special Bonus page. In addition, our merchandising crew had as much fun coming up with Spy & Sniper themed merchandise as we did making the update, so make sure you go and check it all out.
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...is live. What are you waiting for? Go play!
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Oi! You! On the internet! Click this link!
But wait. First, is your boss around? No? Well get him over here! He is going to love this! Your fiancée's parents too. Heck, gather everyone around your computer right now, then read them this prepared statement:
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Hello to you! My name is Stavros. I am now Vice President of Valve game company! Is very exciting! But much work. I am now head programmer, animator and game designer, plus I am washing Robin's clothes. (So many beef stains!)
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"Marianne, send in someone please. Anyone at all. Oi! Send in someone with one eyebrow! That'd be marvelous."
"Sir, you've fired everyone."
"Already? But it's not even eight o'clock."
"You've outdone yourself, sir."
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I think I've found my man. Valve's staff is now down to two employees: me and our Greek intern Stavros Xanthis. We're sitting in the main board room, staring at each other from across the table. I turned up the thermostat as far as it will go. It's hard to make him out behind the waves of heat coming out of the vents, but I think he looks guilty.
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"Alden, you have three seconds to tell me why you're fired."
"Wait, what? I—"
"You're fired."
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Valve's head of HR, Kathy, just came to talk to me. I'd been lining up employees in a row against the wall so I could run past and fire them faster.
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As many of you know, the Meet the Spy video was leaked this weekend. Some of you on the forum have wondered if Valve leaked it on purpose. And until we find the clown who did leak it, the answer to that is yes.
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You've met the Scout, the Soldier, the Demoman, the Heavy, the Engineer, and the Sniper. Then, for some reason, a sandwich. But now it's time to meet the stealthiest, shiftiest, most secretive, suit-wearing TF team member of all...
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Day 4 of the Sniper update brings us…uh… hold on, that’s not…
Holy hell. All those conspiracy theorists on the TF forum couldn’t have been right all along, could they? Pyro's going to be inconsolable now.
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Sniper shows off the latest addition to his arsenal: the Razorback, a beautiful hand-carved tribal shield with a shocking modification.
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If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the spiffy TF2 video made by AyesDyef over here and check out how spot he really is here. It was his birthday earlier this month, so if you see him on a Goldrush out there, wish him a happy birthday before you shoot him!
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Day 2 of our Sniper Update is live, this time with a rundown on a new game mode and two new arena maps. Plus a postcard from Sniper, who likes to keep his parents updated on his exciting, legal, not-being-a-crazed-gunman job.
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No, the Huntsman doesn’t stun. It pins dead/dying players.
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The Sniper Update is upon us.
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Also, a quick note: The fine fellows at Gang Garrison have just released version 2.1 on their webpage. We played a bunch of 2.0, and can't wait to spend some time with the new update. There's a ton of new additions, from Control Point mode to Killcams to Manviches, so even if you've played it before, you should head over there and check it out!
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The Sniper has been a tricky class to update. In particular, designing an alternative to the Sniper Rifle has been a challenge. To understand why, we need to go back, way back, into the mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and we started working on TF2. If it helps, you can listen to the Doctor Who Theme while you read.
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One of the things we've been thinking about for a while now is how to improve the player experience around finding a server to play on. It's a tricky problem because our master servers need to ask a game server for its details, and that server can lie to us if it wants to. We decided we needed to find a way of scoring servers, with a goal of finding and delisting ones we considered "bad". The scoring system had to penalize lying without penalizing custom game rules, because some players like custom game rules. Best case, the system needed to work entirely from data that didn't come from the servers themselves, so they couldn't lie to us in any way to affect it.
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Honestly.
Please, do take a cursory glance at the missive directly below this one. Take care to notice its author, and the dismally recent date of its posting.
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It saddens me that despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, some of you insist on finding new ways to fail.
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The news you've all been waiting for: The Scout Update!
Also, we released an update yesterday with a change that needs some clarification. The update notes said this:
On Tuesday we shipped an update that added a bunch of features / bugfixes / balancing tweaks that came out of the community's feedback. In particular, it made some changes to the underlying TF damage system, and as part of that, it modified the way critical hits are determined. We thought it might be interesting to dig a little into the change, and hopefully give you some insight into our thinking.
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The Scout was one of the first TF2 classes we worked on when we decided to try out a more stylized approach to the game. As a result, his concept art is further afield, and in the eyes of our artists, much more embarrassing. This might be exacerbated by their desire to not have people looking at a piece of their artwork and not liking it, from an artistic point of view. Concept art has a different purpose than that, and so the effort to make it look great is usually unnecessary. In short, there's a special place in hell that all our artists hope we'll go to for showing you their concept art.
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We're just about done with the Scout pack, and our design and coding has already moved on to the next pack. The weapons and achievements are all nailed down, and we just have to finish up the final artwork on them. We like to do the final art as late as possible to ensure that we don't waste any work, which turned out to be a good decision this time around due to the large number of unlockables we tried out as alternatives to the Scattergun. Balancing his replacement weapon has been very tricky due to large threat difference of the Scout between skilled and non-skilled hands. More on that soon.
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We've been pretty quiet lately, but thankfully, that's about to end. In the next few days we'll have an update out that has a couple of new features for the Engineer and Spy, and a variety of other smaller fixes.
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Since the release of Meet the Sandvich in August, several people have asked us how something we'd boasted would be "our magnum opus," "over four hours long" and "make Citizen Kane look like something dumb a complete idiot would make," ended up being one un-dramatic minute spent inside a refrigerator.
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Work on the next class pack is gearing up, a little slower than we'd like. In the meantime, I thought I'd post some answers to the common email questions we receive.
How do respawn waves work? Is my respawn time affected by my performance? Why do they exist at all?
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Well, it's been a couple of weeks since we updated the blog, and we thought it was time to let you know why we've been so quiet. The last couple of weeks we've actually been moonlighting on Left 4 Dead. While the L4D team has been focusing on finishing up the core cooperative gameplay, we've been helping them by working on their Versus mode. Versus is the recently-announced competitive mode where one team plays the Survivors and one team plays the Infected. We've learned a lot while working on TF2 in the last year, and we were able to apply some of those lessons to Versus mode. As a result, we've just finished adding critical hits, respawn waves, flawless auto-team balancing, and facestabs to L4D, while removing anything that looked remotely like a grenade. I kid, I kid.
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The path to arriving at a final design for a character is sometimes a long and winding one. This was especially the case for the Demoman and we thought it would be interesting to step through that process and shed a little light on how we arrive at our final designs. Early on in the process, soon after we decided that we were going to start a new, more stylized direction for TF2 it opened up a whole range of possibilities in terms of what that meant visually. One of the first (albeit short-lived) ideas that was being thrown around was to try to recreate a look of claymation for our game. The idea was to make the world look like a miniature set built for clay figures which animated and gibbed into chunks of clay.
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We decided to create a new TF environment after sensing some desert-fatigue, both internally and externally. The new theme had to be a departure from the current look without being so different that the characters felt out of place in it. We also wanted to leverage some content from our existing environments, since crafting every asset from scratch would mean we'd be moving the release beyond Valve time and into the realm of geologic time.
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We've been a little quiet for the last week as we've put the finishing touches on the Heavy update. We thought the Pyro pack was the biggest we'd be doing for a while, due to the large changes to the Pyro, but the Heavy update has turned out to be even bigger. In addition to the three unlockable weapons and thirty-five achievements for the Heavy, we've got a new game mode with five new arenas for it, a new Payload map focusing on more open spaces than Goldrush, and another popular community-made map. Throughout the rest of the week we'll be giving you the details on all this, and if all goes well, you'll have your hands on it shortly afterwards.
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One of the things we're looking at for the next update is the creation of a new type of environment for our levels to be built in. We're pretty happy with the way our environments have turned out so far, but as we create more and more maps with these achievement packs, we want our level designers to have more to work with in terms of giving their settings a unique look.
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For this week's update, we've got another set of trading card images to take a look at. The focus of our most recent achievement update, the Pyro is a character that players may have seeing a lot of lately - making life a nightmare inferno for both the Spy and Medic.
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One of the things we hope to do on this blog is to point out the creative things that members of the TF2 community are up to. The Steampowered TF2 forum members have been collecting links ever since TF2 was released, and you can take a look at the list (and its accompanying 46-pages-so-far (!) forum thread)here.
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Well, we were expecting some response to A Heavy Problem, but we severely underestimated just how much interest everyone had in contributing. If you're one of the many folks who emailed us proposals and haven't received a response, please accept our apologies, because there's just too many for us to reply to all of them. From the large amount of feedback and forum activity, it's clear that many of you found this interesting, so we'll definitely be posting more design goals. For those of you still thinking about it, here are some more tools to use in evaluating ideas:
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To continue from the previous week, today we have some additional finished trading card images for you to take a look at - the Heavy and the Medic.
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As Gabe mentioned in his lengthy response to an email recently, the next class pack will focus on the Heavy. For the Medic and Pyro packs we kept our goals for the pack pretty close to our chest, but for the Heavy we've decided to open up the process a little.
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During the development process with most of our games, we end up creating content that, for a variety of reasons, may never see the light of day. Sometimes we may not have the time to bring the content to finish, sometimes we use them as a company-only experiment, and sometimes the content just isn't in line with what we're doing at the time. Needless to say, there's a fair bit of cool stuff that we've never been able to share with our fans. We're happy to say that this blog has now given us a unique format in which to share some of the unused artwork with you.
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In any game there's often a bunch of hidden complexity behind some of the simplest looking features, and TF2 is no exception. One example is that of the Medic's medigun. From a player perspective, it appears simple enough: point it at a team mate, press the button, and it'll heal them. After playing with a bit, most players notice that they have to stay near their target and maintain line-of-sight to their target. After playing with it a lot, some players notice that there's some variability in the rate at which they heal their targets. I thought it might be interesting for Medics to explain what's going on here, and why.
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When producing concept art, our artists believe in providing a variety of options for any given subject. A single concept rendering would place too strict a constraint on the resulting game design.
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Now that we've settled into regular releases of content, we've found ourselves wanting a better way to talk directly to the TF2 community about the state of the game and some of the reasoning behind the choices we're making. Our hope is that this blog will accomplish that, and give everyone some better insight into our development process as well.
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