After being gone or "in progress" since the original Team Fortress, Team Fortress 2 is coming, and it looks great. It’s moved away from the mostly realistic styles that most Half-Life mods strive for, instead going for an Incredibles-esque appearence.
Here’s how Alex Simmons at IGN introduces it...
With its stylised graphics and arcade-focused gameplay, Team Fortress 2 is a world apart from the gritty realism of Counter-Strike, at least on the surface. But beneath TF2’s cartoon façade lies a team-based first-person shooter that’s surprisingly familiar, with players choosing from a selection of defined character types before working as a team to overpower the enemy.
You can read the IGN article for more details, and I recommend you watch the teaser video to get a feel for all the character types. I love the look, I love the style. If the game retains that feel, it’s sure to stand out against the numerous mods trying to be the next Counter-Strike. It’s a shame, in my opinion anyway, that it’ll never have a single player component.
I’ve always enjoyed a good first person shooter, but in terms of multiplayer, I always preferred co-op play rather than head to head. Shrug. I never got into player versus player aspect... except for a short stint with Return To Castle Wolfenstein’s team multiplayer; I liked the team aspect of it. It was like a compromise between real co-op and full out deathmatch.
I diddled with that and I tried Counter-Strike, but eventually I let it pass me by. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fun, I really liked it, it was just that I wasn’t interested in putting the amount of time and practice required to keep up with the playing field. Same goes for any MMO that eventually tries to enforce an us-versus-them mentality on a player... when a game goes from being plain fun to being competitive, when it requires me to stop enjoying myself so I can learn the indepth strategies and key combinations and battle tactics, I lose interest.
But hey, that’s just me :)