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While the church downstairs prepares to celebrate the Christmas season, Tripwire Interactive has been busy creating an expansion for Killing Floor that lets you kill Santa Claus, along with a special present for fans of Valve’s Team Fortress 2.
So on the bio on the new TF2 baseball card for Pyro (updated Thursday on the Team Fortress blog) there are five masculine pronouns and one reference to Pyro being a dude. And then the kicker, “if he even is a man”. And now let the bitching and bickering begin again. Valve knows what it’s doing here, and isn’t going to stop. Well played, Valve. (Full size on the jump.)
“The server I found myself on was an odd, unsettling place”, writes Alec Meer, exploring Team Fortress 2′s “Achievement Servers” for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “The tiny, custom map placed the red and blue spawn points right next to each other, removed the wait period between respawns, dropped a single capture point in the middle and placed intelligence briefcases at either end. A small pool of water was placed awkwardly in a corner, and health packs scattered in bizarre columns. No-one could ever win this map – it was set up to repeat forever”.
So Team Fortress 2 fans have been eagerly awaiting the Pyro updates, but the gents at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have been busy mulling gender issues. They found some evidence to support their theory that Pyro is a female character, and cited this CS-Nation interview with lead developer Robin Walker, where he conceded:
“Looking back, we should have shipped some of the classes as female and some as male”.
Said Walker further on:
Limber up your fast-twitch weapon-switch reflexes. Valve’s dropped word that the next update for Team Fortress 2 — centering on the Pyro class — will include a new weapon called the Axtinguisher, among other things.
The Axtinguisher does half damage as a regular axe, unless the target is on fire. Then it’s an automatic critical hit. So my friend Sander, who plays Pyro relentlessly, will now add “swing ax if anyone gets close” to his “backpedal and barbecue” combat strategy.
Valve didn’t say when the new stuff hits, only that it’s “almost completely wrapped”. This latest build incorporates feedback from the April update to the Medic class. That one delivered three new unlockable weapons. However, in addition to the Axtinguisher, Valve says there will be “significant changes to the Pyro class for everyone”, regardless of unlocked items, but didn’t specify. So stay tuned.
Lit Fuse Films is easily my favourite machinima studio at this point, and while they had me with Rusty Whispers – Dennis, their latest bit of game created joy created with Team Fortress 2 has landed their site a permanent place in my bookmarks. Ignis Solus features a lonely Pyro trying to keep himself entertained in a wide-open map, with cameos by the Scout and everyone’s favorite, Heavy. I’m hoping to see a lot more from Lit Fuse using TF2, as the art style really adds a great deal of character to short films like this one. Lovely.
