Their tentative due date is tomorrow - Thursday the 24th of Jan - but it may slip till next week. It's Well, stripped of its control points, restructured slightly, and transformed into a Capture-The-Intelligence map. Also: it's great.
I should warn that I already loved the control-point version of well, and my impression from forum spewings is that this love is not widely shared. But for what it's worth, it really suits CTF.
The area near what was once the second-to-last control points have been rennovated to give another set of stairs to the upper floors of each team's home building, but other than that the structure of the map is largely unchanged. It's better suited to large numbers of players, since the action tends to be more spread out on CTF maps. As an extreme example, Valve's Robin Walker recalled having to defend his team's dropped intel underwater, in the moat outside the train yard.
This isn't one of the two maps that are coming - they're Goldrush and Badlands, as discussed in the last post. But this should appease some of the hordes angry that Badlands has come over all control-pointy.
Actually that's worth mentioning - in the version we played, the trains seemed to have been disabled. It's pretty close to final, so that may well be how it ships. Not sure what the rationale is there.
Actually that's worth mentioning - in the version we played, the trains seemed to have been disabled. It's pretty close to final, so that may well be how it ships. Not sure what the rationale is there.
Could be that the intel gets pushed off the map if you get hit while carrying it, although I'd have thought that would be fixable.
Should be good, but possibly a bit of a large map for CTF?
I was thinking that too. The proof will be in the playing though.
After a brief jaunt on the map I have to say I'm not really happy with it. Well is too large and open for ctf it seems, I didn't feel there were enough choke points. Saying that it does suddenly occur to me that our tactics were flawed when we tried to defend the intel room instead of the front doors.
I'm going to give it a bit longer to get used to it, and play it with more people per side. But I don't honestly see myself liking it that much even then.
After a brief jaunt on the map I have to say I'm not really happy with it. Well is too large and open for ctf it seems, I didn't feel there were enough choke points. Saying that it does suddenly occur to me that our tactics were flawed when we tried to defend the intel room instead of the front doors.
I'm going to give it a bit longer to get used to it, and play it with more people per side. But I don't honestly see myself liking it that much even then.
The map itself is TERRIBLE with a small number off people, you can just have scouts run back and forth, rarely meeting each other as they cap intel. This would appear to be the ONLY TF2 map that is better with high numbers of players (10+ per side), the rest of them are rubbish with anything above 7 or so aside.
I like how open the map is so you aren't forced into fighting in one area, you just fight as you go but it just makes it seem like it isn't worth fighting for nothing in small areas, all your doing is injuring yourself for the harder push later.
It also takes AGES to get anywhere as any class but scout and it's horrible for pyro.
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