Valve starts unveiling updates to the sniper in Team Fortress 2.
Back in the early days of Counter-Strike, everyone got excited about upcoming patches. Because the game spent many years in beta, these patches would bring not only bug fixes and balancing, but also new weapons and maps. Watching files being uploaded to FTP sites was just plain exciting, and being part of the celebratory IRC ‘SpamFest’ release party was mandatory for us hardcore players.
This constant rollout of features did a lot to retain the existing Counter-Strike audience, and its associated word of mouth promotion of the mod. It was upon this foundation that Counter-Strike flourished and became the dominant online shooter for many, many years.
It is a model that Valve now adopts for its games, progressively releasing content to both maintain and build an audience. We saw it recently with the addition of Survival Mode to Left 4 Dead, but it is with Team Fortress 2 that the developer has elevated patching to an art form. Each update not only focuses on fleshing out a character class, but it also adds maps, game modes, and other surprises.
This has turned patch week into an event, with a day-by-day release of information about new items for the chosen class and other goodies in the patch. We have just begun such a week, with Valve setting its sights on the sniper class. While we doubt we’ll see the ancient urine throwing martial art, Jarate, move from April Fools’s joke to actual weapon, there’s certainly going to be some crazy coming this week as the Aussie creators of Team Fortress turn a self-deprecating eye to their countryman.
So far, all that has been announced is a new weapon, the Huntsman. Last week, Robin Walker explained that the update would include a weapon designed to encourage the sniper to get a bit closer than usual. The Huntsman is a bow that comes with guaranteed headshot crits and the ability to pin players to walls like the crossbow in Half-Life 2.
Expect to see a new feature announced every day for the rest of this week. Tradition dictates that the patch will hit at the end of the week – the last update to the scout class actually ended with players being able to vote on the order of weapon unlocks the day before the patch went live.
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