The Stack

In my pursuit of giving at least one real try to every class in Team Fortress 2, I have spent some time on the Medic. The Medic is the one class whose main skill is helping people rather than harming them, so I suppose it’s unsurprising that no one wanted to play one in the original Team Fortress. And yet, I found the experience of the TF2 version enjoyable enough that it’s now, according to the Steam stats, my most-played class. What happened?

Much has been made of the TF2 version’s “Übercharge” ability, which lets you turn a teammate and yourself temporarily invulnerable. (According to the developers, this was added as a way to get Medics more involved on the front lines.) And there is a draw to it — specifically, the draw of the unattainable. Only rarely do I live long enough to charge up fully. Even if I play it safe and stay behind cover, spies seem to home in on me. They see the beam tethering me to my patient and know that they’ve got an easy kill, someone whose reaction time will be slowed by the need to switch to an actual weapon before firing back.

The really appealing thing, though, for rubbish players like me, is that you don’t have to aim. I though the Pyro had it good in this regard, but the medigun really has the flamethrower beat. First of all, when you’re shooting at people to heal them, they don’t even try to dodge. Secondly, there’s that tether I mentioned. Once you’ve got someone on your heal beam, you don’t need to point at them at all; you can turn around and watch for people sneaking up from behind if you want, and the beam just curves around. (Not that this does much good. Blasted spies.)

Team Fortress 2, like any multiplayer game, has a social element. Just what this means depends on the people playing it. Last night, I got onto an open server where several of the players either knew each other, or perhaps were just very friendly. At any rate, they were talking over the game’s built-in voice channel, and not about the game. And I found it unpleasant.

It’s not that the content of the conversation was unpleasant. I know that online games have a reputation for producing antisocial behavior, and have seen for myself the depths of immaturity that people get up to on online forums and comment threads, where, as it’s been said, no one can punch you in the mouth no matter what you say. No, these guys were mostly just making smalltalk and expressing their opinions of various brands of beer. An innocuous (if uninteresting) conversation in any other context, but it was coming to me through the same headphones that I was using to play the game, and that made all the difference. Imagine you’re on the telephone, and some strangers are having an unrelated conversation near you: you can effectively tune it out, right? Your attention is on the sounds coming over the phone. Now imagine the sounds coming over the phone include the unrelated conversation. It would be harder.

I can’t really begrudge them their chatter. It’s probably their server, and I’m a guest. They’re using the game as a social context, a way to relax with friends — it’s been said that “World of Warcraft is the new Golf”, and there’s no reason why TF2 shouldn’t be the same. It just means that people like me, who want to be immersed in the game and undistracted from the experience it provides, should seek other servers. And I did. I also turned off voice chat on my machine, which is a bit of a shame, because it seems like it would be useful tactically, as a way to plan and coordinate maneuvers. But I’ve never actually seen it used that way. To the extent that people coordinate at all in this game, it’s wordlessly, supporting each others’ actions without being asked.

More office Team Fortress 2 yesterday — this is becoming a regular thing. I’m skipping it today — I’m facing a deadline — but made up for it with a lengthy session after work last night, in a big chaotic battle on a public server. Fortunately, it seems that whatever it was that caused my machine to shut off is limited to the Developer Commentary mode. I experienced no problems in the game proper.

By now, I’ve played enough to get three special special class-specific items. There are two ways you get items in TF2. First, you apparently just get items handed to you for playing a lot — I’m not sure if this is bound to specific milestones of total time played or score or if it’s just completely random. One thing that’s definitely random is which item you get — it can be for any class, and not necessarily one you’ve been playing, or have ever played. The other way is to achieve a certain number of class-specific Achievements, which always gives you an item appropriate to the achieving class. Two of my items are of the first type, and the third was for reaching the first Achievement milestone as a Sniper. Which is strange, because I had been playing mostly as a Pyro lately, and actually had more Pyro Achievements than Sniper Achievements. But the Sniper class has fewer Achievements in total than the Pyro, so its milestones come quicker.

The reason I was playing the Pyro so much is that my first Item was a Pyro one: the Backburner, a special flamethrower that always does critical hits when you attack someone from behind. It’s a nice bonus, and more importantly, it alters your tactics by giving you an incentive to be sneaky. Its drawback is that, unlike the standard flamethrower, it can’t do a “compression blast”. I had never used that anyway, so it’s not much of a loss. On the other hand, I kind of want to try it out, now that I can’t do it. So I’ll probably swap the Backburner out the next time I play.

For the Sniper, I got the Huntsman, a bow that replaces the sniper rifle. The guy who started the office session specializes in Sniper himself, and really likes this bow, because it gives the sniper a better chance in close quarters. This may be the right choice for small-team King of the Hill mode, where all the players converge into the same room, but in a larger game, I found I missed the rifle’s scope. Without the ability to zoom in and pick people off precisely from halfway across the world, the Sniper loses its main appeal. So I don’t care for the Hunstman.

The third item is a watch that lets the Spy feign death. I haven’t even used it yet, because playing the Spy is difficult enough to get a grasp on without extra features. I hadn’t played Spy before getting this item, and even now only played it briefly and completely wrong. The difficulty here is that the Spy’s powers mostly revolve around changing his appearance or turning invisible, but there’s no obvious feedback about this: as in most first-person games, you can’t actually see yourself. Most classes play pretty much like any FPS, but to play the spy, you need special instructions.

And I don’t know where to find those. There’s no obvious in-game tutorial or documentation for the classes — there’s some intro videos for the different map modes, but that’s all I’ve seen. The official TF2 website just has a blog and a link to Steam, and the “View the manual” link on Steam just shows a bit of promotional literature about the sentry guns that the Engineer class can build. Everything I’ve learned about gameplay, I’ve learned by word of mouth. I suppose it’s possible that this is how everyone learned the game — starting with trade shows and interviews with the developers, spreading through web forums. If that’s so, and there really is a complete lack of official documentation, that would mean that the game is even more dependent on its community than I had imagined.

Anyway, that’s three items, and it looks like I’m not using any of them at for the time being. Maybe the next one will be better.

In the last 24 hours, I’ve been involved in two more office Team Fortress 2 sessions. The first was apparently on the game’s anniversary of release or something: all the characters wore little party hats (on top of any other hats they normally wear), and, when killed, exploded into balloons and confetti.

As a result, I’ve given a serious try to two more character types: the Demoman and the Sniper. The Demoman, master of the grenade launcher, actually seems pretty bad for this small-team stuff. When there’s only three to a side, you spend a lot of time alone, waiting for your teammates to respawn, and the Demoman is essentially helpless when alone: the delay before his grenades go off means that he can’t really kill any but the most oblivious of victims. His value, it seems to me, is more in the threat of damage than in the damage itself — to limit the opponents’ options by placing obvious threats in front of them. I’m told that the use of grenades in real-life combat is similar — that the point of them isn’t so much to kill the enemy as to make them take cover or flee. Anyway, I found the Sniper much more satisfying, even though I’m rubbish at it. Although classified as Support rather than Offense, killing is all the Sniper does.

The first session left me wanting more, so after I got home, I tried running it on my home PC for the first time. Trying out the Developer Commentary tracks, I was alarmed to find that my machine spontaneously switched off, multiple times. This is an unprecedented problem. I’ve seen games exit to the desktop, freeze up Windows, and BSOD, but never just make the machine power off without so much as a beep of warning. Maybe the graphics card is drawing too much power or something?

It’s been over a month since my last workplace Team Fortress 2 session, but we finally managed another one. We ran a private server with only six players, three on each team. Over the weeks since the last session, there’s been some consideration among this group of what game mode to use for small-team play. In the last update, Valve gave us the answer: King of the Hill.

TF2 has several modes based on capturing “control points”, which you do by standing near them for a period of time. (As I understand it, each player within range exerts influence on the control point, pushing it towards ownership by one team or the other. Once it’s pushed all the way to being owned by one team, it remains owned until the opposing team pushes it all the way back.) King of the Hill mode is such a mode, but with only one control point in the center — a variant simple enough that it’s surprising that it took them this long to add it. It’s good for small groups because it concentrates everyone’s attention on a small part of the map. Not necessarily their physical presence, mind you — a Sniper can still stand a long distance away and affect the battle, as one player proved.

I started this session playing a Soldier, the class armed with a rocket launcher, on the basis that the blasts, even when nonfatal, could push people off the hill, as it were. This turned out to not work: the control point’s range is large enough for people to dodge rockets without leaving it. The Soldier was still pretty effective, mind you — I’m told that picking it is never a mistake, regardless of the map. Still, I switched to the flamethrower-armed Pyro after a while, deeming its hard-to-avoid spread of flame a good way to clear the hill of interlopers. It seems to me that a team composed entirely of Pyros and Snipers could do pretty well on these maps. But what to I know? I’m still a beginner at this game.

I’ve been busy these last few weeks, and look to remain busy for a few weeks yet, but I should probably write up a little something about my inaugural experience with TF2. It’s been a long time since I played an online FPS, mainly because there came a point when it was impossible to be good enough to compete without spending more hours per day practicing than I cared to, or could afford to. There was a time when I was office Quake champion, but only because I was the first to figure out the benefits of permanently turning on mouselook (wich modern FPS games don’t even let you turn off). But that was a very short time. It did, however, lead to my first taste of the original Team Fortress, back when it was a Quake mod. I understand that there have been a number of other versions of the game between this beginning and TF2, but I know little about them.

I remember thinking at the time that the whole idea of assigning gameplay-mandated roles had some potential, but that this potential was largely wasted due to the players’ general lack of interest in actually playing as a team and acting in concert. It would be surprising if this had changed for the better over the years that Generation 4chan got online, but I was pleasantly surprised that the dev team had come up with ways to compensate for it, with gameplay modes that really encourage specialization.

For example, on a Payload map (a mode that is, as far as I know, unique to TF2), one team has to push a cart full of explosives along a track to the enemy base before time runs out. The attacking team needs people to stay by the cart and push it and also needs people to scout ahead and clear out resistance. Which you can do most effectively depends on your chosen class — for example, the fast but fragile Scout will find that sticking by the slow-moving cart negates their one advantage. The defending team obviously needs to get people away from the cart, and the rocker-launcher-wielding Soldier class seems ideal for this, as the blast from their weapons can clear people out of cart-pushing range even if it doesn’t kill them. Meanwhile, their Engineers will be taking advantage of the cart’s fixed route by placing automated gun turrets well in advance of it, while their Snipers will be pressing as close to the enemy base as they dare in order to keep people from reaching the cart in the first place. Or at least that’s how it went when I played.

The game’s style is one of exaggerated, cartoony slapstick. Humor in games seems to be one of my recurring themes this year, and I’ve mentioned before how TF2 has been credited with creating a resurgence of humor in the industry. And it does it without a lot of explicit jokes — mainly it just gives the players the tools for inflicting absurd harm on each other and standing back. Much has been written about this already, but the really interesting thing about the slapstick here is that it’s even identifiable as such. I mean, the action really isn’t all that far separated from that of any other FPS. The whole genre has always been proudly over-the-top, from Wolfenstein 3D onward. So why does this game come off as more of a comedy than most? The caricatured character art and animations are of course a large part of it, but this is not sufficient in itself to leave a humorous impression. I think the pacing helps. Let’s say an enemy Heavy ambushes you, and you return fire, but you die first. This takes about the same amount of time to happen as it takes to read that sentence aloud. Which is to say, it lasts just long enough for the player to fully register that it’s happening, and doesn’t drag on beyond that moment. Obviously not everything is like this, though — in particular, two of the classes, the Sniper and the Spy, specialize in killing the enemy before the enemy knows they’re there. And apparently there’s a tradition of rivalry between these two classes.

One thing I’ve been uncertain about is how this game fits into the Oath. TF2 isn’t winnable, and it keeps adding more content — even now, nearly two years after its release, it keeps getting special bonus items as updates. This puts it into the same category as MMORPGs. Also like MMORPGs, it requires other players online, and thus won’t necessarily be easily turned back to after a delay of years. In short, it doesn’t fit within the model of the Stack. Nonetheless, I’m willing to call this game Complete once I’ve spent a nontrivial amount of time trying out each of the character classes. So far, I’ve tried the Scout, Heavy, and Soldier. Six more to go.

So, the second year of this blog ends with another unplanned month-long outage. It’s been a pretty dismal year for the blog, with only 14 games knocked off the Stack, if I count correctly. I haven’t even finished the Orange Box yet. This is in large part because of the demands of my new job. (The first month-long outage basically coincided with my the first month of employ.) Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great job, miles better than the one I left to take it. But there have been long hours and tight deadlines, on top of a killer commute. It’s nearly an hour and a half each way by bus, which, unless I switch to a portable system, doesn’t leave a lot of time for gaming. Or, to be more accurate, it leaves a certain amount of time for gaming, but not nearly enough time to both game and write about it. I’ve really got to find quarters closer to the office, but not having a lot of time also means not having a lot of time to look for a new apartment.

And so the Oath has backfired: in order to avoid the obligation of blog, I’ve been playing games that aren’t on the Stack. But I’m not giving up. Now that the most recent tight deadline has passed, I’m going to try to ease myself back into this by writing up some non-stack games.

As for what’s remaining on the Stack, I think it’s about time I made my secret files public. There are two ways to view it. First, at some point in 2008, I discovered Backloggery through a link to this blog from a comment thread. Backloggery is a site devoted to people doing exactly the same thing as me, except with less commentary. I had always assumed that when I wanted to put my list online I was going to have to find or create my own HTML interface to it. Seeing that someone else had done the work already, I entered my entire list, and have maintained it ever since.

I found this solution unsatisfying, though, because it didn’t categorize things the way I wanted them. Backloggery sorts by platform, but not by genre. Their list of game statuses includes several degrees of finishedness (“Beaten”, “Completed”, “Mastered”), but only one unfinished status; I had been tracking only one degree of completion, but had several kinds of non-completion (“untried”, “played partway”, “was unable to complete due to unresolved technical problems”).

Then Gunther Schmidl started his own game backlog blog and showed me what I should have done in the first place: just upload the spreadsheet to Google Documents and make it world-readable. So I’ve done that too. My Backloggery page is here and the Google spreadsheet is here.

You may notice that the Google document has 301 rows, while the Backloggery reports only 299 games unfinished. I always spend a moment confused when I look at them. Well, the spreadsheet has an extra row because of the column headers, while Backloggery is missing Pokémon from the “Unfinished” list: by their standards I’ve beaten it and it would be dishonest of me to list it otherwise. I should try to contact some of the other backloggers with Pokémon on their lists to try to arrange trades. It’s probably my only hope of finding any. (Craigslist was a bust.)

At any rate, that means we currently stand at exactly 300 games listed, which is a satisfyingly round number to start the new year on. Not that this number is really all that meaningful: I’ve got 8 points to spend (that’s $80 worth of new games by the terms of the Oath, which can go quite a long way these days), and there are a number of games whose stack status is iffy. Does Team Fortress 2 count? I did buy it, but only because it came with the Orange Box. I suppose I’ll write it up when I get around to trying it, but it’s not in the list right now. What about Peggle Extreme, also from the OB? I don’t think so: it’s really just a demo, not a full game. Or The Next Tetris — a puzzling thing to be on the Stack, perhaps, as it’s not the sort of game that’s finishable, but it has a finishable component, which is what I’m counting for Stack purposes. Except I can’t for the life of me remember if I ever finished it or not. So it’s on the list just in case.

I’m sure that there are other things on the list that will provoke questions, or at least raise eyebrows. That’s why I was so reluctant to publish the list. Anyway, expect another post tomorrow (I’ve already started writing it), and happy new year.