It’s probably escaped nobody’s attention that this week has finally seen the release of the Heavy Update for Team Fortress 2. With so many people at Valve working on Steam and related projects, it’s no wonder that the Steam community has got such a cracker of an update for one of it’s most popular games!
The full list of updates can be seen below the break (the initial update has also seen two additional additional patches, also listed), but the key points are described in more depth at the Heavy Update portal site.
To summarise these key points, the update includes:
The Heavy Update Site has released news of the next part of the pack - the new map Badwater Basin.
From the site:
Badwater Basin is a Payload map focusing on more open spaces and less chokepoints than Gold Rush.
So far so good!
Unlike Gold Rush, where the track is split into three separate stages, Badwater Basin uses a single large stage with several checkpoints. As a result, the Blue team is highly encouraged to push the cart hard after beating their way through the Red defensive line.
Sounds like a hell of a lot of fun!
Head over to the site to see some pictures in anticipation of actually getting to play it. This pack is shaping up to be a cracker!
An update has been released for Unreal Tournament 3. The update makes the following changes:
Fixed overlay mesh showing up on hidden sniper rifle when un-zoomed
Added motion blur menu option for PC (defaults to off)
Fixed zero extent collision bug in octree code (finding nodes in Z axis)
LOD Hysteresis / LOD Decision making bug fix
Fixed default mesh not having proper LOD settings
Fixed rare darkwalker physics crash
Added player name list to server browser
If you’re still playing this, and not Team Fortress 2 then these could be interesting*. If however you’re a Team Fortress 2 player, there is some more news for you!
Following on from yesterday’s update, the Heavy portal site has released information on the first new weapon and all of the achievements that will be available for the class.
The weapon is the K.G.B (or Killing Gloves of Boxing) which will give the Heavy “five seconds of guaranteed critical hits”. This can be used to “to punch and kill further enemies, extending the boost time” or to “switch to another weapon and use the boost to take out an enemy at range”. Either way, sounds like a lot of fun to me!
As for the achievements, no news has been released on what to do to get them, however you can see them all, as well as download the icon pack at the official portal site.
* Please note, I am aware that Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament are significantly different games, however I wanted some way to link the two items and this was the best way I could think of. Sue me
Valve have just posted on the official Team Fortress 2 blog that the much anticipated Heavy update will be coming shortly.
To count down to the release, valve have launched a special Heavy ‘portal‘ which will showcase some of the key features of the pack in small bite size chunks.
According to the blog:
Throughout the rest of the week [they'll] be giving you the details on [everything in the pack], and if all goes well, you’ll have your hands on it shortly afterwards
First up on the heavy update site is the community map they are releasing - cp_steel.
For information on this and everything else in the pack, make sure you keep checking the official blog!
I recently came across this article which details an e-mail conversation with Robin Walker, one of the main dev’s on Team Fortress 2.
In it Robin states that he disapproves of instant respawn and that they cause things to be “heavily weighted towards the defenders in maps like Dustbowl & Goldrush.”
I take Robin’s point, that all the maps were designed with re-spawn waves in mind, but for me it doesn’t answer the key question - why did they do this? Why not just design the maps initially around an instant respawn? Robin says they put them in for a “variety of positive reasons” but never states what these are.
Personally, I don’t go looking for instant respawn servers, but when I stumble across one, I’m a very happy bunny! I don’t tend to sit down for hugely long play sessions, so being able to get back into the action as quickly as possible is a huge bonus to me. Who knows, perhaps they’ll take this into consideration when creating the new environments? Probably not, but if there is one thing that we do know, Valve tend to listen to their players. What are your views on this matter?
P.S. If you’re wondering where the awesome picture above came from, it’s the winning entry from this photoshop contest over on Facepuch Studios forum.
A really nice little update has been released for Audiosurf, which makes the following changes:
Audiosurf friend lists are now automatically populated with friends from Steam
Forced match collections can no longer reset the chain multiplier
Soundtrack CDs now use correct artist names instead of “various artists”
Especially pleasing about this update for me is the addition of Steam friends list importing. This is a feature that I felt was severely lacking in the first instance and am very glad it has finally been implemented!
Updates news has also been posted on the Official Team Fortress 2 Blog regarding new environments. This is quite exciting - moving away from the old ‘wild west’ look and into new places is a really interesting development, and it will be good to see how the manage to make the characters fit into a new world…
The Official Team Fortress 2 blog has recently posted a link to a wealth of community creations from fans of the game. While the blog now has an RSS feed, I thought it was still worth a mention since there really are some good creations there!
