Team Fortress 2

Recently, I've been watching video essays about Team Fortress 2 (TF2). This game has a lot of nostalgia; I'd spent over 1,000 hours through high school and college playing (roughly 2009 - 2013). Despite being released in 2007, the game maintains a loyal fanbase of 80,000 - 100,000 players. The game had such an impact, that it had inspired (and survived) several "TF2-killers". When Valve was making games, they had a massive presence with their franchises due to their very refined game design.

Artstyle & Character Design

As I mentioned previously, TF2's artstyle was well-designed to be timeless and practical. The artists  referenced 20th-century illustrations to create character silhouettes that were recognizable within gameplay. The stylized, exaggerated features facilitated this design, and added a unique charm. I especially like the industrial and spy-tech aesthetics used in the environments. Although unimportant to gameplay, I really appreciate the environmental design that told the subtle, underlying story. 

For example, the map (2Fort or Dustbowl) starts as a regular barn or factory setting. There are plain objects like hay, tires, barrels, or mining carts in the beginning of the map. Progressing through the map, more aggressive warning signs start appearing that read "Restricted Area!" or "Trespassers will be violated!".  Next, advancing through these opened vaults and secret entrances reveal massive underground bases conducting some convert operations. The industrial fronts were just disguises for RED's/BLU's covert, high-tech operations. I don't hear this mentioned much about the game, but I think it fits perfectly with the 1970's Cold War espionage themes.  

Any type of user design should consider its "read hierarchy". It's the intentional design that intuitively guides the user experience. Designers use psychological and behavioral understanding to direct the viewer towards the most critical information. The classes were designed with brightness and size gradients that point towards the important details, such as another player's team or weapon. This allows the player to identify these key elements rapidly during the gameplay. The art team had designed everything in grayscale to ensure visual clarity before adding any color or detail.

The mercenaries are beloved for their personalities, costumes, and voice acting.
They're whacky, but rarely considered obnoxious. 

Gameplay

In terms of gameplay, the original Team Fortress designed the classes to allow game accessibility across multiple skill levels. I would say that TF2 had popularized the concept of class-based shooters, and introduced abilities that didn't required pure mechanical skill. Each class had a particular strength and each provided unique playstyles. With the addition of unlockable weapons, they gave a wide option of choices. 

Obviously from the game's title, players had to play as a team to succeed. The game designers worked this into the design of the classes, wherein the class toolkit presents a playstyle that contribute towards their team's victory without any intentional effort. By focusing on individual players having fun, they're almost making the game into a "single-player multiplayer".

I've mentioned in other posts the issues with competitive multiplayer games and the toxicity involved. However, I don't recall ever feeling too frustrated while playing TF2. One element are the larger match sizes; the levels were designed around 12 vs 12 games. As such, the maps are larger and the impact of a single player is diminished. This means less blame is assigned to any single player. These matches were very casual since (at the time) there weren't any competitive points or ranking to worry about. 

Since most matches were played on community servers, the owners could enable special sound clips or all-chat functionality. This made the games far more friendly between both teams, since they could banter while playing. I would frequent certain community servers and would begin to recognize the "regulars", which really did make the server feel like a community. There are also dozens of purely "friendly" servers, where players can just hang around to show off their cosmetics like an MMO. 

Loadouts

I remember first getting enthralled during the Sniper vs. Spy update in 2009. There was so much hype around each class update. The development team would provide teasers and daily updates detailing the new weapons counting down the release. Their posts were filled with charming quips and promotional art in theme with TF2.

Each new weapon was thoughtfully designed to provide an alternate playstyle change, while still being compatible and faithful to the original class. The compounding updates introduced countless loadout configurations to suit a player's preference. And not to mention all the hats, accessories, dyes, weapon skins introduced to the game; Starting from 2009, there are now over 1600 different cosmetic items in the game! With the game shifting into free-to-play, these items provided a passive-income stream for Valve and created the TF2 economy. Fans would do the hard work of designing and modeling items, so Valve could officially implement them into the game. Players would willingly spend money for a chance to get these rare items, or even buy them directly from other players for real money. 

There was some point in time I had wanted to start a YouTube channel about different TF2 loadouts. I was inspired by the TF2 Youtubers like STAR_ and Jerma985 who had great success with releasing videos with amusing commentary. I planned the videos to be about specific weapon loadouts and the different playstyle they'd require. I thought it'd be real simple: record some gameplay videos and then record some audio. But I did realize how much effort goes into capturing good footage, writing a script, and editing it all together. 

Needless to say, I've abandoned my ambitions to become a famous TF2 Youtuber. There are now many  TF2 fans creating similar content, where they discuss in-depth the gameplay strategy or flaws of specific weapons. There are also many entertaining animations created with the TF2 mercenaries. There are also many video essays detailing the TF2's design history and impact on the FPS genre. Not to mention the thousands of workshop items that fans are creating for the game itself. 

It seems like TF2 has been able to perpetuate itself through its fanbase, even though major dev support had seemed to wane since 2017. It's a shame, since Valve likely has no incentive to support the game any further than it needs to. It's likely generating a lot of revenue through their in-game shop and turning a considerable profit running with a ghost crew. However, as long as players keep supporting the game servers will continue to run.