Aug 14, 2009

Team Fortress 2: Classless Update Day 2

Tags: DLC & Demos | Team Fortress 2 | Valve

The second day in Valve’s classless update brings the old favourite King of the Hill to the class based shooter. KOTH, for those unfamiliar with the gameplay mode, has nothing to do with the Mike Judge comedy about Texan Hank Hill, nor does it actually have anything to do with hills per se.

Simply put KOTH is all about capturing a single location (which could be a hill, but not necessarily) and then keeping control of that point for a set period of time. Naturally the opposition will be using everything in their arsenal to gain control themselves and if they do then the roles are simply reversed until the location is captured.

For this momentous occasion Valve has even taken the trouble to design a new map Viaduct especially for this mode, that for the first time in a TF2 map, features snowfall. Only to discover that the very active TF2 community had already made a snowfall map long before and were keen to point this out, a lot, to Valve (community’s a bitch). To mix things up a little they have also converted two other maps to be played in King of the Hill, they are Nucleus and Sawmill.

Viaduct is an all-new map especially built for KotH, set outside of the entrance to a secret underground base. Viaduct is also the first Team Fortress map to take place during a snowfall (not counting Acegikmo’s awesome cp_glacier map, or for that matter all the other community mappers who manage to think up and execute on all the cool stuff before we even think of it). Both teams start at the base of a low hill, and will have to climb to get to the capture point at the hill’s peak. The various elevations of the map and multiple routes to the central point guarantee some frenzied battles as the point changes hands during gameplay.