Call of Duty vs. Team Fortress 2...FIGHT!!!

If you want me to get into that hopelessly pointless "games as art" debate going around, this is as close as you're going to get. But actually, this is an encomium (praise of something) that I wrote for a school assignment. It is framed as a praise of Team Fortress 2 as well as a condemnation of Call of Duty. So, let's get to it now.

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Encomium on Team Fortress 2

“All it takes to change the world,” said Captain Price, “is one good lie and a river of blood.” At first this may seem like a profound statement, but as with all things, we must consider the context. This quote comes from the intro to the final level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and represents what could be called the most inspiring moment in the game’s cheesy, convoluted plot. In a nutshell the real problem with Call of Duty is that it takes itself seriously and tries to present a real life war scenario, but is stuck in a tight development schedule and is forced to resort to being a cheap adrenaline rush. Today I would like to introduce a game which is in many ways a complete opposite to Call of Duty, and a fun escape from reality. After all, video games aren’t actually real, so why must they keep trying to be? And now I present to you the completely unrealistic, anti-serious, and all around cartoony game, Team Fortress 2.

History of Team Fortress

It all begins with Valve, a game company founded by two ex-Microsoft employees, who became widely recognized for their first game, Half Life. Half Life is an apocalyptic, sci-fi first person shooter and physics puzzle game. Although on its own it is recognized as an outstanding game, and one which pushed the bounds of game storytelling, it also had one huge feature that is essential for long-term success. This feature is mod support. Mod support means that a game’s core is able to be easily modified and used to create other games using the same core, this is known as a “mod.” Many Half Life mods were released by fans, the most popular one being Counter-Strike. The mod was so popular and successful that Valve purchased Counter-Strike and continues supporting it with regular updates even today. Another popular Half Life mod was Team Fortress Classic. Team Fortress Classic was originally developed as a mod for Quake, and later Quake World, and called Quake World Team Fortress. Valve was so impressed with the mod that they hired the 3 creators, Robin Walker, John Cook, and Ian Caughley, to port the mod to Half Life and release it as the retail game, Team Fortress Classic.

Valve announced that it was then developing a sequel, to be called Team Fortress 2. Initially, it was planned to be a sequel which simply expanded on Team Fortress Classic gameplay, and was to be released “soon.” What made Team Fortress so unique was that it focused on cohesive teamwork, with different duties assigned to the 9 distinct classes: Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Spy, Heavyweapons Guy, Demolition Man, Combat Medic, Sniper, and Engineer. Each class had different strengths and weaknesses and required a completely different play-style to be successful. Team Fortress 2 was only meant to refine this formula, namely by adding a player in the sky who was to help direct the different players below. This never happened, for years Team Fortress 2 was never released, and it was widely considered “vaporware,” an intriguing concept which would never see the light of day. Then, after nine years of development, Team Fortress 2 was released in October 2007, but it was not like anyone had expected it to be. Unlike Team Fortress Classic, or most any other shooter game, Team Fortress 2 does not have realistic graphics or physics, and the overall battle scenario is not plausible in the least. After 9 years of development Valve had made a game whose only similarity to its humble mod origins was the 9 class layout.

Gameplay

Any combat-shooter game is expected to at least try to mirror reality. Call of Duty, for instance, gives you real weapons, a somewhat sound plot, a multitude of friends, a larger multitude of enemies, and an even larger battle-field. Beyond just that, it has to do its best to justify why you are doing what you are doing as well, commonly resorting to a WWII setting or a modern nuclear war. And as for Team Fortress Classic, well in that sense it had an identity crisis, the graphics and physics were that of a typical battlefield, but the weapons could be considered “experimental” at best, and “completely absurd” at worst. So in the midst of serious shooter games, which try and supply a sense of excitement by constant attempts to justify the actions on screen, there is Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress 2 still has 9 distinct classes, though much more polished and balanced, but now looks like the pixar movie: The Incredibles. And now the nine class layout is sorted into a neat triad of triads: in offense there are the scout, soldier, and pyro; in defense there are the demoman, engineer, and heavy; and in support there are the sniper, medic, and spy.# It lets a Soldier “rocket jump,” or jump and fire a rocket at his feet, to reach great heights, with no significant health penalty. And there is also the Heavy, who has a personal minigun named “Sasha,” or the Medic, who fires syringes at enemies. When the Demoman isn’t firing flourescent grenades, or placing “sticky bombs,” he is drinking from his liquor bottle, on the battlefield. The Engineer can quickly deploy and upgrade automatic sentry guns, and even teleporters for transporting teammates across the map, while keeping watch for the Spy, whose “electro-sappers” can take down all his devices in mere seconds, and whose butterfly knife can kill him instantly with a backstab. The Sniper can literally pin you to the wall with an arrow, and the Scout can double jump right over you. The Pyro simply goes berserk with a flamethrower as he mumbles through his gas mask, but watch out, because he can sneak up behind you and assault you with a garden rake, called the “backscratcher.”

As though the classes and their weapons weren’t crazy enough, then there are the objectives, which are fairly devoid of meaning, and make you question why two groups of arch-enemies, Reliable Excavation Demolition (RED), and Builders League United (BLU), would build their “bases” a matter of feet apart. The answer to all this absurdity is simple: fun. If games aren’t real (which they aren’t), then why must they pretend to be real, if being crazy is so much more fun? Aren’t games supposed to be fun, and if realism is preventing a fun experience, why not abandon realism altogether? Team Fortress 2 is Valve’s answer to these questions, and I think you will see that their answer is correct when I compare it to the most reputible “realistic” game, Call of Duty.

Call of Duty aims for the most realistic experience possible with its core design principles: photo-realistic environments, and intense, fast-paced, “do or die” action sequences. Thus, the campaign missions default to typical stereotypes, such as “small but important job in a much larger war,” where you may have to take down a group of 3 anti-aircraft guns, or “supersoldier in the midst of a massive, bloody battle,” where you and 10,000 other soldiers must take back the capital city. But in the midst of staging these “realistic” scenarios, the developers figure out that having to go through the same process to destroy 3 AA guns, or dying along with thousands of others over and over and over again may not be quite as fun as they had hoped. So they try and enhance these mission with slow motion moments where you miraculously free a group of hostages in the most random places, or are given insane amounts of weaponry to make the massive, bloody battles easy as butter to slice right through. These quick fixes to a fundamentally boring game make it into nothing but a cheap adrenaline rush.

However, Team Fortress 2 actually has fun objectives, which aren’t governed by the assumption that games must be plausible. You can try to gain possession, or maintain possession of tactically meaningless locations marked by a circular metal plate and hologram, or you can push an oversized bomb cart along a rickety old train track that culminates with its detonation in a large pit. You can even battle for posession of a bedroom filled with toys, and a base under the bed; or just mess around fighting other people with no “objective” at all on a recreated Mario Kart racetrack. You can do whatever you think is most fun, and that leads me back to the point I am trying to make in praising Team Fortress 2, which is that games are meant for fun.

Character Development

And finally, I would like to discuss the importance of character development in games. Let’s start with the easy one: Call of Duty. In Call of Duty, characters are archetypal drones with no purpose other than to give some meaningless “philosophical” speech, or an “exhortation” to reach the next waypoint...I mean...errrrr...objective. For instance Imran Zakhaev, a Russian villian, gives a speech for the opening of the flashback level One Shot, One Kill, where he says, “Our so-called leaders prostituted us to the west, destroyed our culture...our economies...our honor.”This is as much justification as the game gives you for why everything is happening, Zakhaev hates the west, and you don’t like him either, so you need to kill him. Oh, and it somehow involves nuclear bombs too, a prerequisite for every Call of Duty game.

In Team Fortress 2, each of the 9 classes has a unique character in addition to his unique play style. The Heavy is comfortable with his relative unintelligence but knows he can make up for it with overwhelming force, and this explains his desperate exclamations on the battlefield in his Russian accent, “Cart stop moving...we must push little cart,” or his admission that “some people think they can outsmart me...maybe...maybe...but I have yet to meet one who can outsmart bullet!” The Scout is comfortable with his position as weakest on the battlefield and prefers to make up for it with speed, agility, careful movement, and most important, arrogant insults, “I’m runnin’ circles around ya,” and “I ain’t even winded,” and introducing himself with, “you know who ya talkin’ to, sort’v’a big deal,” all in his Jersey accent. The Engineer is comfortable with, well, being comfortable, as he sits behind his sentry, wrench on his knee, dispensing some Texas-homeboy common sense advice. He gives exhortations to fallen corpses shot by his sentry like, “I told ya don’t touch that darn thing!” and “you ladies shoulda oughta brought some men’folk with ya,” though he will occasionally break cover to point and laugh, as he slaps his overall-covered knee. This is just a sampling of the unique and vivid characters in Team Fortress 2 that make the world feel alive. They aren’t interested in preaching to you or driving you to a checkpoint, they just have a nice time. This I think, makes one wonder, “If characters in Call of Duty never have any fun, then how am I expected to enjoy such a game?”

Conclusion

Games, first and foremost, are supposed to be fun, but over the years many developers have decided they need to be realistic. Then, in focusing on reality, the fun disappears, and Call of Duty has to do its best to bring it back with slow-motion sharpshooting or gratuitous missile strikes, ignoring the heart of the problem. So I would like to recommend Team Fortress 2, where you can live like a cartoon character, and feel no shame in doing so. Stop worrying about lobbing that grenade just right as you sprint to a control point, spraying bullets everywhere as the controller slips from your sweaty hands. Enjoy a game which is, first and foremost, fun.