Team Fortress 2 was the multiplayer title included in this package which also included the likes of Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and the original Portal.Īlthough it might be sad to see another game from the PS3 generation become unplayable, most fans likely aren't going to lose much sleep about Team Fortress 2 getting shut down. Team Fortress 2 was originally released in October 2007, but it did so as a game included in Valve's The Orange Box. You rarely need up-to-the-moment network features for that, whatever your game of choice.Within the past month, the servers for Team Fortress 2 on PS3 finally went down, making the multiplayer-only title unavailable to play. Painfully laggy though the matches are, that community is still playing games of capture the flag on 2Fort and control point on Dustbowl-for nothing more than fun, for the joy of sharing play with other people. If you log on now, you'll see some of the same players from a decade ago." "But the most beautiful thing about the community is that it didn't, and still hasn't.
"We knew TF2 was always destined to die," Villar says. The flaws forced us to spend more time interacting, albeit with different means than headshots and healing.Īnd small though it is, given there's no way to meaningfully play competitively on the PS3's TF2-that lag is just too crippling-the community still remains. In some ways, the PS3's lack of network features brought us far closer together than we would have been if TF2 had been easier to play on Sony's last-gen platform. But even when we couldn't play properly, we'd spend the day chatting with each other on our forum, and goofing around in the game. Some competitive skirmishes we'd planned never happened due to one of a hundred different reasons. Related, on Waypoint: How the Zelda Community Finally Gave Link a Voice "And we did pretty well with the little we had." "We tried to do everything and anything we could to keep this game going," Villar says.
This included trapping them in the spawn with five Demoman, and setting elaborate traps with sentry guns in the most bizarre hiding spots on the map. Most times those players didn't have a mic and rarely responded to direct messages, so we did whatever we could to urge them to leave. We didn't have the capability to boot players from matches, so we had little recourse if a random player joined the server we had planned to scrimmage in.
"But we'd keep trying until someone happened onto a West Coast one, as they were the most reliable." Once we settled on a server to join, we'd communicate that to everyone through our website's chat, and everyone would rush to join the game. "No matter where you were, if you created a server it would almost always be labeled 'East Coast'," says Ramos. We had a very limited range of servers to choose from, especially since the majority came riddled with lag. He could clear a whole room with a handful of explosive sticky bombs, making a skilled user nearly impossible to counter.Ī typical match consisted of a few of us scouting out possible servers for us to join. A good example was the incredibly overpowered Demoman. Game days started out by establishing rules on our community forum, as the PS3 version of the game never received buffs or nerfs to rebalance the characters after release. In order for us to actually play competitively, we had to dedicate significant chunks of time to get matches set up, make sure everyone was in game, and hope they all had a secure connection to EA's wobbly servers. In most cases, we spent more time working our way around PS3 TF2's lack of clan support, custom matches, and reliable servers than playing. We created guides to help new players get acclimated to the PS3's shortcomings, and provided a community of support that was active almost all the time. We created an introductions page and went out of our way to invite players we met in-game to our forum. "We tried to do everything and anything we could to keep this game going, and we did pretty well with the little we had." - Ramie 'Indoe420' Villar It was that extra work that brought us PS3 players closer together. So much so that we were willing to put in the extra effort in to make the game work for us, effort that wouldn't have been necessary if we'd received the same updates elsewhere. "Honestly, all of that didn't affect us," says Villar. He, just as I did, put up with all of those shortcomings, and more, which players of other online shooters simply wouldn't stand for. Ramie 'Indoe420' Villar also stuck to the PS3 version, despite its crippling lag, constant bugs and lack of balance.
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