We recently got the opportunity to check out Team Fortress 2 up at Valve's Bellevue studio, going hands-on with four maps and sitting down with members of the development team. Below you'll find an interview with Valve Engineer Robin Walker, Project Lead Charlie Brown, and Marketing Director Doug Lombardi. Though we were mainly discussing the PC version, there's information about the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions too. The Xbox 360 version's network code is apparently so far along that PC and Xbox 360s were actually playing together online during a LAN session. Whether or not this function will be supported when the Orange and Black Boxes release around September remains to be seen, but Valve is ready either way.

All versions of Team Fortress 2 will ship with six maps and feature nine selectable classes. Each map features one game mode, from Capture the Flag on 2Fort to varieties of control point capture on the other five. At launch the game will not support bots on any platform, but they may be included later on. After you're done with the interview, be sure toAlso, a quick note, we conducted two interviews, one before the play session and one after, hence the few timeline discrepancies.Let's start by talking about why do classes at all, because everything follows from that. A class should be an experience in a bottle. An engineer should be an experience, a soldier should be an experience, and those things should be different, so there's no point of having two classes where the experience of playing them is the same, or at least is negligible in terms of the difference. When we think of different experiences we're thinking about things like player decision making, when you're in some situation as a class, the ones you make as that class should be different than if you were a different class, and certainly the factors you care about should change and so on. So to us classes are about bottling up various experiences. The reason various classes changed are mostly because we were unhappy with the experience itself like in the case of the scout, where we were fundamentally unhappy with it [in the original Team Fortress Classic (TFC)], we thought it was substandard. It basically involved you not having fun in combat and having to run away from things all the time.: No, now the scout is effective in combat. No a good scout player kills the crap out of people. A scout, these days, if you retreat from combat, you're going to collect health and go back into it. In the TFC days, the scout was, you will lose to every other class in all cases in combat, and we didn't think that was a good experience. The scout today will chew up medics and pyros and soldiers. But it's not as simple as that, right, like a scout fighting a pyro in an open space is going to win almost every time but a scout fighting a pyro in a really enclosed space is probably going to lose every time. We want those kinds of different factors pushing on the combat, it shouldn't be too binary. So, that was one of the reasons why classes changed.Some other reasons why classes changed is we were unhappy with them relative to other classes. For example, the pyro and the soldier, we didn't think were separate enough in TFC. The pyro was pushed much more into a unique role now as this ambusher which he really wasn't in TFC. Similarly, just trying to break classes apart, you know, the demo man was not so unique in TFC because everyone had grenades, but now he is the only guy with those, with indirect fire explosive capability and so he's much more unique as a result. As a general rule pretty much every change we made, every addition, removal, whatever, you could probably trace back to just a single overriding goal of how do we make this class more unique.: It's mostly because the game mode and the geometry are a little too tied to separate. You can't take a great control point map and toss flags in and have it play really well. In general we find we wind up making many adjustments to the geometry of the map.: Capture the flag maps tend to have more choke points, whereas capture points the point itself is a choke point, so it's a bit more free form.: Things like the medic came out of, one of the other observations we had in multiplayer space was that it's really, really, really hard to get 10 people who don't know each other, or 16 people who don't know each other and have bad communication capabilities to work like a team on the internet. We've all been trying to solve it. And so with the medic we sat back and said "well instead of focusing on trying to deliver a substandard connection between all these people, what if we said lets make a really high powered connection between two people?" So we tried to make this medic where the interaction between him and this other person was really tight. As the medic you're always watching this other guy and as the other guy you're always keeping an eye on your medic. We built this a couple of years ago and when we played it we found that that was much more successful.I guess the other thing the many changes grew out of was not just how do we build distinctive classes, but how do we address these core problems of multiplayer, like, you know, getting people to interact with other people and replayability, stuff like that. The critical hit stuff actually is another example of that, and the invulnerability also. One of the really important things we want in single player gaming is pacing. When we looked at TFC and some of our other multiplayer games we found that pacing was nowhere near as good as it is in single player, there weren't highs and lulls and so on, it was just kind of on all the time. And so what we tried to do with the medic, invulnerability, and the critical hit stuff is to try and craft pacing.