COLUMN: ' Play Evolution' - Team Fortress Classic
[“Play Evolution” is a bi-weekly column by James Lantz that discusses the changes that games undergo after their release, from little developer patches to huge gameplay revelations, and everything in between. This week: the life and death of Team Fortress Classic.]
The evolution of Team Fortress Classic is one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. It was so sudden and so decisive that it, quite literally, divided the player community into two halves. As the community played quasi-intellectual tug-of-war, individuals began to take sides and the game itself began to change - every server began to branch off into its own set of rules and restrictions. Most of these are still explicit, but some became unwritten and, to this day, are laid carelessly about the fringes of the game, the final nail in Team Fortress Classic’s long-suffering coffin.
Team Fortress began as a Quake mod in 1996. Based on the Quake engine, it was an incredibly fast paced CTF game based around movement exploits: bunny hopping, rocket jumping – all that fun stuff. It developed a small but devoted following, but only a few people followed it to its next iteration in the form of a slow paced Half-Life mod called Team Fortress Classic, three years later.
Team Fortress Classic caught fire, both as a competitive and a casual game. The draw of CTF is universal, and the meticulous setup of offense and defense adds a fresh layer of strategy to what is otherwise a pretty plain variation on Team Deathmatch. As the competitive players began to explore the limits of the game they found it warm, fleshy, and pleasantly yielding. For awhile, everything was roses and unicorns and happy springtime elves.
At some point, the competitive players rediscovered a familiar exploit – bunny hopping – and the evolution of Team Fortress took a sudden leap. Now, bunny hopping refers to a lot of different things in a lot of different games. In many games, bunny hopping simply requires you to mash your spacebar key as quickly as humanly possible and watch as your character hops up and down erratically like a foaming idiot – but this is not the kind of bunny hopping Team Fortress classic has. In Team Fortress Classic, bunny hopping requires a complex series of deft mouse movements that takes a few days to learn, and many more to master. However, bunny hopping allows you to travel almost twice as quickly across the map, as long as you know where you’re going and don’t hit anything.
In a split second, the game changed completely. Bunny hopping gave skilled players an impossibly large edge over unskilled players. Players who memorized the map and knew how to bunny hop were unstoppable. However, the game remained balanced, albeit fast paced and hectic. At the competitive level, the game flourished and continued to evolve around bunny hopping, returning to its fast paced roots from a different and refreshing angle. However, at the casual level, the game suffered. Bunny hopping was difficult to learn, and bunny hopping players had such an advantage over other players that it began to drive new players away.
As fewer and fewer players joined the game, the community became divided. Some players argued that bunny hopping was a necessary evolution in the game, that it made it more interesting and that it was the only way the competitive game could evolve, all of which was true. Other players argued that it was too hard to learn, and that it was driving away new players, and that was true too. As the community divided, casual servers made up their own rules, disallowing bunny hopping and other forms of movement exploits. Meanwhile, the competitive league began to shrink due to the lack of new blood. Eventually, the casual community, having actively restricted the evolution of the game, grew stagnant, and Team Fortress Classic became a ghost town with a few dedicated followers. Its own evolution had destroyed it.
What went wrong? Occasionally the player community decides that a certain change imbalances the game ([EDIT: Akuma] in Street Fighter) and restricts it. However, it is usually the competitive community who dictates this change, not the casual community. When the casual players decided to restrict bunny hopping, the competitive players let it run free, and it became the very heart and soul of high level play. It was true - bunny hopping did not imbalance the game, and it was a key point in the evolution of the game’s strategy - but the player base couldn’t handle it.
When the casual community isolated themselves from bunny hopping, they isolated themselves from any high level play and, thusly, the evolution of the game as a whole. Each server was its own tiny world parked within the greater lot of Team Fortress Classic. To play on a different server meant learning the game all over again, and so, with a crippling lack of new strategy and a daunting multitude of restrictions, the casual community drew its dying breath. The competetive community continued on in small, nomadic groups - but the game is a ghost of its former self.
Although I’m usually against developer involvement and I prefer to see how a game evolves on its own, the learning curve of a game is pretty important. If a technique creates a chasm so large that the casual community just ignores the game at a competetive level, the evolution of the game is brought to a screeching halt. All the new strategies are meaningless to the casual community, and all the casual players are useless to the competetive community. The learning curve had to be fixed. In Team Fortress Classic, that gap between the skilled players and the new players, though necessary in all games, was just too daunting, and it ultimately scared away all the players that it needed to stay alive.
[James Lantz is a starving writer whose idea of proper viral marketing is to blurt out "Psychonauts!" every other sentence. He also writes a blog, of course.]
Comments
I'm not convinced that casual players refusing to adopt bunnyhopping killed the competitive scene. My problem with bunnyhopping, and conc jumping, was that it made very little sense in the context of the game - and forced players to use classes in a way they were no longer intended. As a fairly hardcore TFC player - I experimented with all the strategies that appeared. But they actually made the game less fun. They forced a rigidity of thought which made the quite imaginative teamwork that I really loved from TFC redundant.
Nice post though.
Posted by: Tim E | September 12, 2007 2:07 AM
Feel free to correct me. I was not by any means a hardcore TFC player during the time this was happening, and had to get most of my information second-hand. I'd love to hear your side of things. :)
Posted by: James Lantz | September 12, 2007 4:50 AM
It's pretty similar to the prevalent snaking problem in playing Mario Kart DS online. The offending player powerslides around the whole track, even on straightaways, allowing them to constantly be boosting. Players are divided on whether snaking equals cheating. But one thing is clear, if you race a player that snakes and you don't, you will lose.
Posted by: Matt A. | September 12, 2007 6:26 AM
Occasionally the player community decides that a certain change imbalances the game (Akira in Street Fighter) and restricts it.
I think you mean Akuma :)
Good read
Posted by: Joel T | September 12, 2007 10:37 AM
Heh, fixed the Akira/Akuma flub - Akuma will be laughing like he normally does.
Posted by: simonc | September 12, 2007 12:05 PM
Matt - Yeah, I had heard about snaking before, but had never really drawn the parallel - cool.
Joel - Hah. Oops.
Posted by: James Lantz | September 12, 2007 12:12 PM
As much as I love speedrunning and physics glitches and the like, I think any new FPS coming out today would have a hard time arguing in favor of reimplementing the bunnyhop. Once you've mastered it, it's basically an overcomplicated "go faster" button, and pressing that button constantly takes focus away from the cool unique parts of TF's design - teamwork, other movement skills, the core move+aim FPS skill.
Here's hoping that TF2 develops both a casual and competitive community, and that the barrier between the two is semi-permeable and not on the basis of one's mastery of a particular exploit (albeit a time-honored and depth-enhancing one). Something tells me Valve won't screw this up given how central TF2 is to their multiplayer portfolio.
Posted by: JP | September 12, 2007 12:56 PM
"Here's hoping that TF2 develops both a casual and competitive community."
Valve have gone to great lengths to ensure that's what happens. I'm going to love it!
Posted by: Tom Edwards | September 12, 2007 1:26 PM
TFC will never die. And while I expect to play the shit out of TF2, others who like the original mechanics better will probably play Fortress Forever, which is supposed to be TFC: Source.
http://www.fortress-forever.com/
Posted by: J. | September 12, 2007 4:50 PM
James,
I kind of expected you to delve into the topic of whether or not such techniques are good for gameplay. I understand the impact this can have on a community, but do you think it cheapens TFC?
I'm on the side of Tim E., and I do think something like bunny hopping undermines the TFC experience. That said, I really loved using conc jumps as a Scout, but that was limited by the number of grenades you had, and it felt specific to that player type.
Sweet, sweet gray area.
Posted by: Jared | September 12, 2007 5:05 PM
Jared - Expect more delving in future columns - this one was a little more superficial.
As for the particular issue of bunny hopping in TFC, I think the idea of the "TFC experience" is pretty interesting. What is the TFC experience? Is it the way the game was when it was first released? Is it a special sweet spot hit somewhere during the player-run evolution of a game that creates a memorable experience? If so, what should a player do?
A game needs a competetive player base, no matter how minor, to continue existing. This means that players have to be testing the limits constantly, and expanding their strategic horizons. To a purely competetive player, no exploit can be ignored - unless it unfairly skews the game towards one player or another.
In TFC, bunny hopping was fair. It was striking, and it changed the game entirely, but it was fair. No individual player gained a specific advantage from the ability to bunny hop. However, if a strategy exists that is clearly dominant and does not imbalance the game in any drastic way, it must either be accepted by the community or patched out by the developers. No community can handle ignoring a dominant, fair strategy, because where do they go from there? Who is to say that one strategy dilutes the game experience while another does not? Suddenly, another dozen questions are raised: some people don't like conc jumping in their games, some people think this gun or that gun makes the game unfun. All the while, no one is bothering to try out new strategies (they'll ruin the experience!) so the game just sort of sits there.
When the community begins to restrict itself to doing things that retain this fleeting experience, it only slips further from their grasp. In that sense, I see little difference between bunny hopping and the TFC experience - it seems to me that they cannot be seperated. Assuming that the players are left to their own devices, it was an inevitable evolution of the game.
However, I think the developers should have stepped in and toned it down. I liked it, personally, but anything that divides the community that harshly can't be good for the game (and indeed, it isn't).
Posted by: James Lantz | September 12, 2007 8:41 PM
I think the TFC experience is what players make of it.
That said I agree with Tim E, exploits and conc-jumping created rigidity of thought and selfishness, especially when used by "powerplayers" whose only concern was making flag runs.
I couldn't see the fun in that way of playing it's exactly like grinding in Wow.
Maybe the problem was with the maps, maybe they should have found a way to implement maps with randomly arranged paths in order to keep the gameplay fresh.
Posted by: moi | September 13, 2007 5:55 PM
Without bunnyhop and conc jumping, TFC would have died before 2000. Casual players are fine--they're one part of what a game needs to survive--but they are transient, and without bhop and concing the TFC competitive scene would have been so dominated by defense that it would be pointless to play.
Folks, if you never played run or shutdown2 in a clan (or Gather) environment, you never played TFC.
Posted by: yam | April 7, 2008 9:31 AM