Steam cilent updatin‘ mah game!
Team Fortress 2 received a fairly significant patch today, which adds a number of notable gameplay tweaks to the TF2 formula. The changes should please and anger a decent amount of folks in equal amounts – Spies and Engineers see significant buffs while Demomen might not be too happy with the changes they’re receiving.
Engineers can upgrade teleporters and dispenser to a third level now. Taking a teleporter to the third level will reduce the annoyingly long downtime after each teleport, while upgrading a dispenser will boost its healing and ammo dispensing capacity.
Meanwhile, Spies can now recharge their cloaking devices by picking up ammo. Most Spy players have learned to play methodically, cloaking and decloaking and laying in wait while their devices recharge. This change should make Spying a more brisk, fast-paced experience, though don’t be surprised to see large quantities of Spies playing recklessly in the near future as they go a little overboard with the newfound versatitility of their cloak.
Finally, the bad news: Demomen’s sticky bombs can now be destroyed by any gun that uses bullets. It used to be that you needed a Soldier’s rocket or a Pyro’s airblast to take out fields of sticky bombs. No longer – shotguns, the Sniper’s machine gun, the Heavy’s minigun – they can all take out sticky bombs. Demomen will have to play a bit more cunningly (or less stupidly) to get their kills.
Valve also looked to the future of TF2 beyond this patch, announcing that the next class update would be for the Scout, and that they were focusing on making the class more versatile on different maps. They also mentioned that work is progressing on a “massive” update for TF2 on the 360 which will include all the new content that the PC version has seen in the past year. Finally, the TF2 engine will be getting a little bit of nip/tuck courtesy of the Left 4 Dead engine, meaning “some of L4D‘s performance improvements, like the better multicore support.”
Cheers, mate.
