Sorry, Battlefield: Hardline, it's nothing personal. Your cops and robbers CTF battles have the subtlety of a playground pile-on, but I've managed to extract a few moments of fun from the chaos. I like the violent, bass fart of your P-90, as I did in Battlefield 4, and Battlefield 3. And I like the way you use the Frostbite engine to fill the air with floaty bits of burning chaff even though I have no idea where it all comes from. The problem is the competition. There's just so much more laughter and joy to be had in a seven year old free game called Team Fortress 2.

In Team Fortress 2, you can play a man with a bow who throws jars of urine at people, and yet I care more about what happens at the end of a round than I do in a game of CoD, Battlefield 4, or Battlefield: Hardline. Perhaps I've been overexposed to the grey modern military aesthetic. Let's face it, Battlefield: Hardline, even though you have sweet uniforms and cop cars that go "wee-woo", I'm still playing a floating pair of arms holding the same weapons I've held in dozens of games in the last five years, opportunistically grabbing points to serve my personal leveling curve.

Team Fortress 2 lets me play as a giant Russian who punches men to death with mutant bread. That makes me laugh, but it's not why I care about Team Fortress 2. If you stripped away that timeless, characterful art and dissolved those levels back into their virgin white-boxed state, I'd still have fun. It's true, Battlefield: Hardline, the Source engine can't do wide open squares or collapsing cranes. I won't see a pale sun mirrored in the glass of a skyscraper in a TF2 map, but I will swear out loud as our team throws itself at the cart in Gold Rush, desperately trying to take that final 90 degree left turn.

I could write all day about that point in Gold Rush, but first Let's talk about snipers, Battlefield: Hardline. They're bastards. I rarely see them before it's too late. They're often perched on the edge of a skyscraper miles above the fight, untouchable. I hurl myself across open spaces and hope for the best. In Gold Rush, they're on a raised balcony some ten, twelve metres away. Even playing as TF2's slow, easily sniped Heavy class, I have the option to wait for a medic to buff me to invulnerability. If I want revenge I can become a Spy, and when that happens the map becomes a different place. Suddenly I'm looking for stealthy routes through the fight, and taking carefully designed flanking routes to get behind those snipers for an instant kill.



The design of Team Fortress 2's maps, and the careful restrictions on each class, pulls competing mobs into tactical arrangements that are easily understood and fun to fight. At close range spies and Pyros fight a private war for supremacy. At mid range Soldiers toss splash damage into condensed zones of conflict, charging forward when an invulnerable Heavy-Medic team rush past. You don't fight for the "100XP" pop-out that accompanies a kill in many shooters, you fight for territory at a range that makes the fight feel personal. Team Fortress 2 battles look insane, but they're beautifully designed.

Don't be sad, Battlefield: Hardline, I still like the bit when you're on the back of a bike driven by a convict loaded with a moulting sack of cash. You can't do that in TF2, it's true. You may well argue that comparing Battlefield and Team Fortress 2 is silly, but once you've peeled back the facade, you're both class-based team shooters in different robes. And consider the fact that players only have so much free time to spend in a game. You will probably be sixty dollars on launch, and looking at Battlefields 3 and 4 there may well be a bunch of post-launch DLC that'll gradually fragment the community until the next Battlefield arrives. Team Fortress 2 is free, and just received the latest in a long series of free updates. It doesn't have a leveling curve that often incentivises selfish action over teamwork, it has a random drop system that rewards everyone with a free thing every hour or so.

Finally, think about how the experience of being a Battlefield: Hardline fan might compare to the experience of being a Team Fortress 2 fan. Your double XP weekends will be fun, I'm sure. If you choose to follow Battlefield 3's battlepack route, players can look forward to being tempted into spending more money on item packs. Thanks to its key-and-crate system, Team Fortress 2 is also guilty of this, but be careful that you don't turn every interaction with your service into raw advertising for the next expansion, the next battlepack deal, the next EA shooter.

There's a vast gulf in public perception that puts EA at the 'faceless corporate entity' end of the spectrum, and Valve on the 'can do no wrong' end. Valve teams are masters at talking to their communities, they have a knack for generating memes, and they're extremely funny. It might seem insane to spend so much time making comics and 15-minute movies, but every interaction with that material makes being part of Valve's world worthwhile. You get to join a big, fun club, complete with in-jokes and entertaining asides. That's what makes me care, not just about TF2, but about their entire ecosystem. Boot up Steam and get it downloaded, everyone. I'll see you on the final turn of Gold Rush.

Image credit: The Toastening, by ToastPlusScience.

After kneading the community into a yeasty mush of excitement, Valve have finally pulled their update out of the oven. Love and War is available now, bringing a selection of new taunts and weapons. In addition, they've slightly tweaked their long-standing secret recipe. By which I mean they've seriously altered the balance of the Demoman's Sticky Launcher.

The primary themes of Love and War are, in no particular order, guns, bread and dancing. The new taunts can work across the team divide, and as such, the game is currently filling with impromptu conga breaks.

The new weapons have somehow caused everyone in our office to reinstall the game, despite it already being packed with weapons. Chiefly, I suspect, it's because we want to try out the Soldier's new parachute. Although, I'm just as interested in the Scout's new back-critting shotgun. (I hold the unpopular opinion that Scout is the best stealth class. Other people would say Spy, but he can literally turn invisible. That's cheating.)

But here's a thing: a couple of balance changes will cause dramatic shifts to long-standing loadouts. For one thing, there's the Sticky Launcher with this update, its bombs now have a damage ramp-up. It's a big nerf to air-sticky attacks, as it'll take two seconds from shooting for a bomb to do full damage. It's an attempt to shift the weapon to its original trap-setting purpose. It's just weird that it's taken this long to happen.

Also changed: the Pyro's Axtinguisher. That will now only do mini-crits on burning targets if attacked from the front. It makes me a sad Pyro.

See the full patch notes below.

Love & War Update


Added 5 new weapons, 15 new taunts, and 43 cosmetic items for the Love & War update
Partner Taunts can now be performed with the opposing team
Added a new Taunt Loadout with 8 slots so multiple taunts can be equipped at the same time
Taunts are no longer equipped in the Action Slot
Pressing the Taunt key in game now brings up the new Taunt Selection menu
Pressing the taunt key while the Taunt Selection menu is open performs a weapon taunt, or joins a partner taunt


Mann Co. Store


Added 15 new taunts and a taunt bundle
Added 5 new weapons and a weapon bundle
Added 44 new cosmetics and a cosmetic bundle
Added "Taunt" category into the store
Added Mann Co. Stockpile Crate Key
The "Hats" and "Misc" categories have been merged into "Cosmetics"


Items


Added the Mann Co. Stockpile Crate to the droplist
Each Mann Co. Stockpile Crate can be repeatedly shuffled to contain a set of 4 possible items
Added the Mann Co. Audition Reel. Contains taunts and a rare chance at an unusual taunt
Updated Mann Co. Crates to display which Unusual Series they can potentially output
Added Bread Box Special Crafting Recipe. This recipe will no longer be available after July 9th, 2014. Items from the Bread box have a chance to be strange.
Added crafting recipes for newly added weapons
Added Killstreak Kits to MvM for newly added weapons
Added OzFortress Season 11 tournament medals


Weapon changes and updates


With The Hitman's Heatmaker, pressing reload now activates focus when it is full
The Axtinguisher now does mini-crit damage from the front and full crit damage from behind to burning targets
The Bushwacka can no longer randomly crit
All mini-guns now have damage and accuracy ramp up after they start firing. Full accuracy and damage is reached 1 second after firing.
All Demoman stickybombs now have damage ramp up. Full damage is reached 2 seconds after firing.
Updated Loch-n-Load reload animation
Sentry bullets are now affected by damage falloff outside of sentry scan range
Sentry bullet damage has been changed so it calculates damage based on the sentry's position, not the Engineer's


Misc Changes


Updated the Halloween holiday to automatically be enabled when the server runs an _event map
Added a check to prevent achievement announcement spam
Converted several weapon models to use the c_models system
Updated the localization files
Bug Fixes
Fixed an exploit where charging Demoman could turn more than allowed
Fixed a bug where Halloween spellbooks were overriding PDAs and Disguise Kits
Fixed The Director's Vision taunt not playing both variations for the Pyro
Fixed the Pyro's spell audio not sounding like the rest of the Pyro's audio
Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause items to unequip themselves
Fixed a dedicated server crash related to using 'mp_forcecamera 0' with one player on the server
Fixed a regression with the trigger_gravity entity not correctly applying its settings
Fixed another exploit where Engineer buildings could build up a large amount of health
Fixed a server performance issue related to the item_teamflag entity
Fixed the itemtest command
- Fixed cosmetics shared between multiple classes not rendering correctly
- Updated the cosmetic item list to sort by name


Map Fixes


Updated cp_granary
- Removed collision from lights and small props protruding from walls
- Fixed collision on fences
- Fixed the tire props near Blu's forward spawn so players may no longer jump up to the spawn door platform
- Fixed players shooting through gaps around forward spawn doors
- Fixed door protruding through roof on Red's forward spawn
- Fixed a collision bug that gave players access to the roof above Red's spawn door
- Prevented players from building inside spawn room doors
- Adjusted area portals to improve rendering and performance
Updated koth_harvest_final
- Added metal panel prop to Blu building, which now mirrors the jump up on the Red side
- Small performance increase through prop fade adjustments
- Players can no longer build inside spawn doors
Updated pl_upward
- Fixed physics debris triggering the payload cart s finale explosion


Image credit: The Toastening, by ToastPlusScience.

This week s mysterious Team Fortress 2 Love & War campaign has so far spawned a fifteen minute movie and a handful of new emotes, but Valve has gone further today with the announcement of a huge drop of new weapons and items. Among the lucre is a new level 1 Scattergun called The Back Scatter, a level 1 Shield dubbed The Tide Turner and a new parachute called The B.A.S.E. Jumper which slows your descent when falling.
Most important though, is the arrival of a handful of new bread-themed buffs and attacks, obviously inspired by yesterday s hilarious and, let s face it, very moving Expiration Date short film. The only condition is that these are limited edition items: you ll need to craft the all important Bread Box before it expires on July 9.
Once you ve done this you can use the Bread Box to craft a host of advantages including The Self-Aware Beauty Mark which punishes coated enemies with mini-crits. The Snack Attack is a sapper, while The Bread Bite rewards the player with 30 per cent faster move speed when worn. Watch out though: you ll incur 25 per cent more damage. Finally, the Mutated Milk rewards 60 per cent of the damage done to an enemy covered with milk . Full details are listed on the Team Fortress 2 site.
Here are all the new, non-bread weapon and item details for your pleasure. There's a bunch of new achievements as well. We're expecting two more announcements this week so be sure to check back.
The Back Scatter (Level 1 Scattergun)
Minicrits targets when fired at their back and at close range
-34% clip size
No random critical hits
20% less accurate
The Tide Turner (Level 1 Shield)
25% fire damage resistance on wearer
25% explosive damage resistance on wearer
Full turning control while charging
Kills while charging refill 100% of your charge meter
The B.A.S.E. Jumper (Level 1 Parachute)
Press 'JUMP' key in the air to deploy.
Deployed Parachutes slow your descent.
The Classic (Level 1 Sniper Rifle)
Charge and fire shots independent of zoom
No headshots when not fully charged
-10% damage on body shot
The Air Strike (Level 1 Rocket Launcher)
Increased attack speed while blast jumping
Clip size increased on kill
-25% damage penalty
-25% clip size
-15% explosion radius