Fortress Forever is out

I know nobody but me 'inherently' gives a damn, but www.fortress-forever.com

The client just got released today after roughly 3+ years in development. It's a Source update of TFC, created by the top modders and players of the original games community. It's also free, so if you want to kick it in Dustbowl without paying for the TF2 beta it's probably a solid option.

I'm d/l now, and expect greatness. Hopefully a few other Chewers give it a shot too.

Eh. Part of me wants to ask how you define "real thing". The rest of me is just happy the d/l is half done so I'll just say "see you serverside!"

Fair enough. Download finished, extremely excited. Wee!

Okay, so very initial impressions:

- They've made the whole thing 'clearer' and more noob friendly. There are clear HUD indicators of friend and foe, the loading screens tell you about the points of interest on the map (IE use Demo to det the water entrance in Well), and the team-select area is a fuck of a lot clearer. Very well done there.

- The graphics are just okay. This isn't TF2. Maps are nice looking, and the architecture of things like Shutdown2 resemble the originals pretty much perfectly. The textures are kinda bleh (someone in-game said it looks like Death Match Classic, which is accurate) and the character models are a bit boring.

- It feels like TFC. Glide-jumps, strafe-jumps, bunnyhop, rocket-jump they all work splendidly.

- The physics on the nades needs work. When you throw them, they don't appear for a second and then the actual physics are sort of "choppy". The blast radius on them seems to have been drastically reduced, which means spamfests like Dustbowl should be more interesting.

- Cloaking spies are cool.

- You can mix and match different pre-selected shapes for your crosshair. This is decidedly awesome as fuck. They also offer an easy way to change your nade timer sound (and the ones they give you with the game are pretty cool, especially the acoustic guitar one).

- Door opening animations are buggy and awkward.

- The game appears to have auto-reload on by default, which is good because it means I don't have to waste time making a damn script for it.

- They've added some cool little things like the ability to control the sentry-gun with your own crosshair, and having a menu option for 2-click nade timers.

All in all, it needs some polish but it's fun as fuck and feels like TFC with upgrades. I know what I'm doing all day today.

Further Observations:

- Cornfield beats the shit out of Avanti as an Attack/Defend map.

- Aardvark is pretty great. Kind of like Mulch_Trench, but without the trench. It's got a speed ramp at the front door that's just fun as hell.

- Some CTF maps have been set up to not count regular kills/deaths. You only get points for flag caps, killing SG's and dispensers. This is awesome. People actually play the game now.

- Concing seems harder, but then I haven't done it in like a year or more. The concs themselves look super sexy, and the effect for them is great.

- Pyro's are no longer useless. They are vicious bastards at close range, and the flamethrower is very fun to use.

- The effect when you get hit with the spy's tranq is nifty.

- Voice chat seems to work fine, which is nice. Had people working together and figuring shit out (haven't encountered any singing as yet, though I guess give it a few months).

Back to game.

I never have trouble finding a game. Looking at the server list right now, I see 85 with users playing. A third of those are near full, more than half have 6 or more users.

I have downloaded plenty of mods, excited to play, only to find one or two laggy servers up (or none!). That is not the case here.

It does need a patch, though. There are 2 or 3 game-breaking bugs floating around. The worst offender being the one where kills/deaths don't register.

Yeah, it's too bad. I guess what it's mostly due to is, yes TF2 came out and that was expected to be a big draw. What wasn't counted on was most of the hardcore TFC community trying this for a few days before going back to TFC.

FF was incredibly robust and stable for a first-release community mod, but the errors it still had were enough to frustrate newcomers and make old players decide it wasn't worth it.

Maybe there'll be a resurgence after a couple patches, but it's a damn shame.

In general, I feel like the HL2 mod community is pretty well dead in the water. This is also a shame.