Team Fortress 2 – Updates ruining gameplay?

I seem to share a rare opinion on the new updates that Valve are releasing for Team Fortress 2. While many welcome with open arms the new load out system and the changes for each class that are going to be released, I myself see it as ruining the game.

I became such a fan of Team Fortress 2 due to the fun of all the classes being extremely fair, complementing each other perfectly, but I think these updates are taking away this brilliant quality. Many of you witnessed how after the medic update, every server was full of German accented, lab coat wearing players, desperately trying to unlock the new achievements before everyone else, giving them the new and improved load outs. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great idea that they’re trying to change it to make it more fun, but why change it when it was fine in the first place! Many of you will disagree but I felt the simplicity of Team Fortress 2 was one of its strong points, and while this technical altering of classes may suit other people, but it just seems like one massive complication, and also, after all the updates, will the game really be fair anymore?

That’s where I’d like to mention another point. Achievements. I, like many people, was happy to see Steam releasing achievements for their games, Xbox live had this for a while, and it really does make the games more fun, but with the increasing amount of achievements, and the rewards that tie in with them, it feels like many people are playing games as they feel under pressure to get these achievements.

They also spread the Team Fortress updates to Day of Defeat, forcing it into a “Steam works beta” when it was a near perfect game already, which annoyed some of the small but dedicated fan base Day of Defeat had. The worst change was copying the “zoom in and who just killed you” camera from Team Fortress and placing it in Day of Defeat, which ruins the entire sniper strategy that Day of Defeat had.

To sum it all up, I enjoyed Team Fortress 2 before the updates, and I think all this ubersaw, and axetinguisher or whatever the hell it’s called, is something that will end up ruining a perfectly fun, fair game. Perhaps most of the love for these load outs is based around it being something new, either way I anticipate with the new Pyro updates, servers will be filled with much of the same overplaying classes.