Halo’s designers might tell cock-and-bull stories about three-minute loops or weapon feel, but the fundamental building block of every first-person shooter ever made is gibs. An FPS without gibs is no FPS at all, and for a couple of worrying days there, Team Fortress 2 looked to be in danger of losing its title.
Thankfully, Valve’s dev team have restored the bloody bits to their rightful place at the centre of one of the best first-person shooters on PC – and fixed a bunch of other stuff to crop up in the wake of Scream Fortress.
For a few days players weren’t falling apart into gibs when killed, and TF2 was deprived of one of its longest-running sources of chuckles.
That’s sorted now – alongside a client crash related to the main menu, and a host of problems with the Engineer’s machines.
Buildings – Valve’s catch-all term for everything the Engineer can construct – were being erroneously removed from the map during round restarts. And the Rescue Ranger, the class’s long-range machine retrieval gun, was picking up buildings through walls.
Merasmus was causing plenty of trouble too, as is his wont. Ammo was behaving unusually if a sentry gun finished building after a Merasmus curse had started – and Engineers were able to pick up builds halfway through the wizard’s third-person rants.
Finally, the TF2 dev team have fixed some wonky player glow effects, which were ruining the spirit of Halloween. Have you got involved in Scream Fortress this year?