The Orange Box Dissected - with Valve

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Please note that this is the third and final part of a feature focussing on The Orange Box. Part one of the feature can be found here (Half-Life 2: Episode Two), and part two can be found here (Portal).

An all-star cast, an all-action shooter, and an amazing game - lead developer Robin Walker talks Steve Hogarty through the rise of Team Fortress 2

Valve's devotion to its customers, their unheard of desire to ensure that at every turn we are inescapably pleased with their product, is no more noticeable than with Team Fortress 2. Like doting mothers, they've been keeping tabs on how we play. Vast mountains of data stored in underground bunkers keep records of our every action - that time you were sniped on top of the bridge in 2fort? It's in there. And all in the name of improving the thing more and more.

"Most of the time the stats tend to confirm things we already know," explains Robin Walker, lead developer on Team Fortress 2, "but there are cases where our assumptions are incorrect, like players using one area more than another. Or the areas that are most lethal.

"We're trying to find flow, where players are dying, where players spend most of their time, and where the areas of contention are. It helps us understand the areas that have the most traffic, and where we should be a little more careful with performance. We need to make sure that the areas where most of the combat's happening is where we hold back on the amount of detail, so that we can leave as much of the frame rate free for the combat."

Valve recently released many of these stats, purely as a point of interest for the players. Deathmaps showed hotspots - areas in which more people were dying - while other stats revealed which classes were more popular. Oddly, on certain supposedly symmetrical maps the Blue team seemed to be victorious more often...

"We're not sure about that one yet," offers Walker. "The tricky thing about stats is that you need to make sure they're 100 per cent foolproof before you run off and start changing the game.

"There are actually a couple of bugs in those stats that we know of already and that we're going to fix. The weighting towards the Blue team is really interesting - you could theorise that it's down to Blue being the first team on the selection screen, so on average more people are selecting Blue, meaning that the Blue team has slightly more players on it than the Red team.

"We really want to dig into the stats a lot more and see that they're correct before we start tuning. Obviously if it's something that's just a result of human nature then maybe we shouldn't be tuning it at all - it's a tricky balance."

MATCH UP
With this almost inexhaustible supply of information pertaining to how good we are at the game, the classes we enjoy playing and the people we enjoy playing with, why haven't we seen the world's most astounding matchmaking system yet?

"We're working on matchmaking right now for Left 4 Dead," claims Walker, "and the plan is to roll that back into Team Fortress 2 and all our other multiplayer products. We've no firm plans in terms of being able to say what exact feature-set you'll get, but there's absolutely some matchmaking systems going in. In terms of more generalised matchmaking, not so much on the individual level, but on team and clan levels, that's something we'd really like to get into Steam at a basic level, so that it supports any product."

And as with any product, you can't just send a game out into the world and expect it to work either, you've got to pitch it into a minefield of trials, to face legions of testers not only hunting for bugs and ensuring the game's nine classes all balance correctly, but also making sure that the game is accessible to newbies and veterans alike.

"We're very interested in the understandability of everything," explains Walker. "We do a lot of testing with people who've never seen the product before, people who have shooter experience but not Team Fortress experience, and others who may be daunted by online shooters. The goal is to find people who are least likely to understand the signals that the game's giving them, but may still want to buy the product if we do our job well. It's not a lot of use bringing in really advanced FPS players who can understand a game at first glance no matter how bad a job we do explaining ourselves," continues Walker.

"Over time we can start dropping in any player and they can understand what's going on, and we start transitioning more into testing with the more experienced playtesters, worrying more about balancing and finding exploits.

"One of the things we really cared about with the experienced players was that their instincts about how a class should be played were somewhere in the ball park of how the class actually works. We didn't want people coming in and saying, 'well this class is clearly intended to do this, so therefore I'll play like this,' and then fail because we thought it should be played differently."

Valve even go so far as to rent shelf space at a local games shop to see how their box art looks compared to the competition. And every playtester's PC is hooked up to a webcam, beaming the player's face right into Gabe Newell's office, where he probably sits nodding and taking notes on a clipboard.

"Sometimes playtesters aren't able to describe their emotion or their responses to things," explains Walker.

"So instead we can see it when we look at their faces. We're a lot more interested in what the player does and how they react rather than what they tell us at the end of the playtest, because by that stage they've filtered it through their own thought processes."

SOUND OFF
What's surprising is the sheer number of voice samples each class have to hand. Not only is the game visually striking, but the quality and quantity of the sounds, their delivery timing, and the all-pervasive funniness with which they are infused, are pleasing to the ear.

"When the character goes to speak it looks at the state of the game," explains Walker, "what you've been up to and what your enemies have been up to, all sorts of stuff like that. Then it chooses a line apt for the situation. We definitely tried to make sure there were some really rare ones in there.

"We're bringing the voice actors back for another session soon, and one of the things we want to do is to record even more of those lines, so that if people have actually exhausted the lines there'll be a new bunch for them to discover."

"I don't personally know how many samples there are," confesses Walker, "but we all got together and decided that there should be some extremely hard-to-trigger lines that would hang out there for months in the hope that people would have the exact experience to make them happen. We wanted them to be playing in their third month and hear something they'd never heard before. It's a combination of player-performance and game-state."

We're particularly fond of the Soldier's battle cry of "I'm going to strangle you with your frilly training bra." Any favourites at Valve?

"I get to be in the same world as you're in," laughs Walker, "where I get to hear new ones and laugh at them, but I've always had a personal favourite in the Scout, as you baseball-bat up a load of Engineer's buildings, you yell 'There goes all your stupid crap, morons!' I've always liked that one."

Steve Hogarty