July 14, 2006 - Nearly 10 years ago, a trio of fellows named Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley released what would go down as one of the most important mod releases to date, Team Fortress. The free modification for the original Quake brought about class-based team play into the world of 3D shooters, allowing players the ability to take on the roles of a sniper, spy, medic and more and make use of their specialized skills in a slew of multiplayer modes, including Capture the Flag and Attack and Defend.
The game was successful enough that the team formed TeamFortress Software to begin work on Team Fortress 2, what was then intended to be a commercial mod for Quake II. Valve Software quickly snatched up the young development house and released their sequel work as Team Fortress Classic, a free mod for Valve's own Half-Life. After its release, Valve announced that work on Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms was underway and a short while later released a handful of screenshots and a gameplay trailer.
The Old Look....
For its time, the game looked to feature some extremely impressive technology, like proximity-based lip syncing on characters that matched actual players' voice chatting in-game. It also looked to have changed style quite a bit, shifting from the original Team Fortress' hectic play to a much more realistic combat simulation. Unfortunately, the screenshots released in 2001 were the last time that any concrete information had been heard about the game, until now.
Valve has now revealed that Team Fortress 2 will make up the multiplayer component for its forthcoming Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Along with Valve's experimental first-person puzzler, Portal, Team Fortress 2 will be a standalone game but essentially free as part of the Episode Two package. No price has been given as of yet, but it's assumed that it'll run for $19.95 like Episode One.
... And The New Look
Team Fortress 2 will feature nearly all of the classes from the original game, including the Heavy, Spy, Scout, Demolitions, Engineer, Medic, Sniper, Soldier and Pyro, making for nine classes in all. Valve hasn't released any sort of information on what loadouts each class will carry.
While the classes have largely stayed the same, one thing that's extremely unique about Team Fortress 2 is its look. While the video that we saw was an edited-together montage, it featured in-game footage of the characters posing smugly for the camera, giving us a great look at the game's art and rendering style. Characters have been designed in a highly exaggerated fashion, drawing attention to what we'd assume would be their main attributes. From the sickly-thin frame for the sniper (the better to hide with) to the massive hulking arms for the heavy, it looks like you'll easily be able to spot character classes in the middle of a battlefield.
The most unique thing about the characters' looks however is the way they're rendered. Using a brand-new lighting system implemented into Source, the characters look like a cross between an action figure and a cartoon. They're clearly 3D, but feature very little texture detail. The lighting is extremely smooth however, giving them the appearance of being sculpted models or something similar - Toy Story-esque is the description that probably comes closest.
The teaser that we saw showed little more than the characters posing for a quick bit, so as of yet we know nothing about game types, map designs or anything else of that sort. Team Fortress 2 (along with HL2: Episode Two and Portal) do not have a firm release date as of yet, but being as Valve plans to ship Half-Life 2 (along with Episode One and Two, Portal and TF2) to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at the same time as the PC release of Episode Two, we can expect mid-November to be the earliest we'll get our hands on it. On the other hand, Valve had planned to ship Episode Two roughly six months after Episode One, which released on June 1st, so plan on seeing the game sometime this winter season.