As I suspected earlier it hasn’t taken long for Valve to patch Team Fortress 2 and prevent the cheats from exploiting the console commands which allow you to unlock all achievements. Whether this will remove the acheivements already unlocked via this exploit has yet to be seen, but for now, all us honest players can breathe a sigh of relief.
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
Mere hours after the Gold Rush update has been released for Team Fortress 2, PC Gamer is reporting that cheating is already on overload due to a (soon to be patched?) console hole in Team Fortress 2.
It seems that Valve left a console code enabled which allows you to unlock all the acheivements, and therefore unlock all the new weapons available to Medics. I’m not going to reveal the code here, as I don’t approve, however a quick google will find you the answer if you’re that way inclined.
I’m sure this will be patched soon, but remember, next time you get killed by an Ubersaw, instead of shouting obscenities at the screen, you may only need to shout one word… “CHEAT”
The long awaited Team Fortress 2 update, aptly named Gold Rush has finally been released on Steam. The new update adds a new map and game style, as well as some extras for the Medic Class.
The new game type seems to be going down a storm, breathing new life into a game that may have been going a little stale for some. The new map is certainly alot of fun, however, the update is not without its problems.
Not unsurprisingly, there has been a bit of a ‘gold rush’ of sorts for the Medic class, with 36 new acheivements and 3 new weapons for the class, servers are starting to look a bit like your local BMA meeting.
I’m sure this will die down soon enough, but I can’t help wondering whether it would have been worth releasing updates for another class at the same time just to calm down the frenzy!
Either way, the new acheivements are a welcome addition for an ‘acheivement whore’ like myself, and unlike some I also quite like playing as the Medic!
The new updates are available for Steam now, and more information can be found at the official site here.
On a day of much Steam news (more to come…), we learn that our favorite platform for downloadable content was very nearly a totally different monster.
According to gamesindustry.biz Valve originally asked Microsoft and Yahoo (among others) to build their Steam platform for them.
They were rejected, and thank god. Anybody who has played a Games for Windows game that ’showcases’ Microsoft’s attempt to get acheivements and online multiplayer onto the PC will know that it’s not a patch on the platform that Valve has produced.
Valve’s VP of marketing Doug Lombardi had this to say:
“You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft…and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam,” he explained.
“We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later.
“We went around to everybody and asked ‘Are you guys doing anything like this?’ And everyone was like ‘That’s a million miles in the future…We can’t help you.’”
All I can say is “Phew…”
Following on form John’s post yesterday, I thought it was worth a mention of Crossover Games by Codeweavers. If you’re a Mac user and have a burning desire to play your favorite Steam games on your alternative platform, there is now a way!
Bit-tech have a great review of the software which is a customised Wine build designed to play Windows games on your Mac. It ‘officially’ supports both Half-life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and will also play a vast array of other games.
While it’s not quite perfect, and it’s not the official solution that we all hope Valve will produce at some point in the future, this is definately your best best so far if you’re looking to get these games up and running on your Mac right now.
Great news for gamers and Linux users today as Valve appears to be actively recruiting developers to work on a port of The Orange Box for Linux. Word came when a Valve employee posted a message in the #ubuntu-offtopic IRC channel advertising the position. Looking on the Valve jobs board also reveals a job that matches the same description.
This of course leads to the potential of the Steam platform being ported to Linux. Right now Linux gamers are forced to emulate Steam and its games with a huge performance cost. Making it native will be a huge boon to that community and could even lead to further ports of Steam to other platforms down the road (ahem…MacOS). More news when we have it.
This week’s highly informative and always entertaing GFW Radio (mp3 link) features an interview with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. Towards the end of the podcast the crew get into the details of Stardock’s approach to digital distribution and as one of Steam’s main competitors Wardell gives his candid thoughts on Valve’s service. He says there was strong customer demand for them to put their products up on Steam but was reluctant to side with valve due to their 30% cut and his general ambivalence towards what could be become the “Wallmart of digital distribution”.
Wardell goes on to say that Stardock are attempting to produce a viable alternative to Steam so that there is more choice on the market. Stardock’s new Impulse service will support persisant worlds and newer business models than what is current available as well as providing functionality similar to Steamworks such as match making and community features. Wardell states “I don’t think you are going to see Half-Life on Impulse real soon….and probablly you won’t see Sins of a Solar Empire on Steam anytime soon.” Interesting interview.
It’s still not clear as to why Ubisoft have restricted their recent Steam push to only include the US and Canada. Following in the footsteps of Atari this now sets a worrying trend for Steam users outside of North America who had become used to receiving equal treatment when it came to releases and prices. My personal opinion is that this comes down to price. As Valve bill everything in dollars and the dollar is weak right now these publishers may think it’s more profitable for consumers in other territories to purchase the games in their local currency be it pounds, euros or whatever.
The question for Ubisoft is this, are the lost international sales on Steam going to be made up by more profitable retail sales overall? Assassin’s Creed hits Steam on the 9th of April in North America and will be on retail shelves in Europe on the 11th, we shall find out then.
Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:
Team Fortress 2
- Added Custom Tab explanation dialog to be shown the first time the server browser is opened
- Changed Medigun Ubercharge meter to drain faster for each target that still has Ubercharge beyond your current target. This means there is a penalty for having multiple people being Ubercharged at one time
- Fixed crouch-jump exploit that allowed players to get outside of the world
- Fixed bad characters in the chat string when achievements are announced in languages other than English
- Fixed a few instances of truncated text in the menus and dialogs for languages other than English
- Fixed problem that was preventing some dedicated servers from uploading gamestats
- Fixed scoring bug during Sudden Death when the map timelimit is triggered
- Added the string “(extra slot was added for SourceTV)” when maxplayers is increased for SourceTV
