Opinion: Psychopaths and Dead Rising 2

The new Dead Rising has made huge numbers of improvements in it's simulation of mass zombie genocide. Aside from being released to the PC, Capcom has improved graphics, given the player thousands of new and inventive ways to slice and blow up mobs, and even produced a subplot that makes you care about at least one person in the game, even if every other character is boring. Most of all however, Dead Rising 2 has solved an issue which made the first game unplayable for me. It finally made psychopaths defeatable without the use of adrenaline shots. Certainly there are people who completed Dead Rising, some even complete it in record time, but most people would be hard pressed to claim that there was anything fun about the Psychopaths from the first game. There were enemies that were simply punishingly unfair if you failed to bring a gun, such as Carlito Keys, or there were some that were simply punishingly unfair no matter what you brought with you, such as Steven Chapman, who would run you over with a knife covered shopping cart if you meleed, and then shot you with a shotgun if you tried a gun. Chapman actually halted my playing the game last time. I lost the 6th fight with him, threw a controller at a wall in frustration, and then took the disk out of the Xbox, never to be loaded again.

The reason the old psychopaths feel so unfair is because of three things: interrupts, knock back, and knock prone. There is no universal definition of these words that I'm aware of, but they are pretty easy to understand. Interrupt stop the enemy action from occurring. In games like No More Heros, interrupts are the bread and butter of combat. Watch this video, for example, of Travis fighting Bad Girl:



An attack stops her current action, and then she has to block before her actions can renew. Knock back is kind of just interrupts plus. A knock back stops the current action, and then pushes them a particular direction. Useful if the target needs to be pushed towards something explosive. Knock Prone should be obvious, it knocks the target over, which then gives you a bit of freedom to reposition yourself in the battle, and a little extra time. You can see that again in the above video, when Travis pile drives her. The interesting thing about both Dead Rising games is that the enemy has the ability to do all three of these things to the player, who's action can always be minimally interrupted. Psychopaths, with rare exception, cannot have their actions interrupted. While an interrupt can occur periodically, almost randomly, none of the psychopaths I've played with at this stage can be knocked back or knocked prone. Take your pick of explosives, none of them will ever push a target, or knock them back to give you time to think. This is true of Dead Rising and it's true of Dead Rising 2, so why is the first one a bunch of bullshit, and the other genuinely enjoyable?

There were three changes to this one that makes it significantly more enjoyable. The first one is how many psychopaths you are required to fight to continue the story. Playing through the first game, the number of psychopath fights you are required to complete is five (six with overtime mode). One of those involves a man with a sniper rifle, so if you forgot a pistol you're fucked. In Dead Rising 2, you only have to defeat two Psychopaths to move the story along (three with overtime mode). Halving the number of psychopaths you are required to fight, and making all others optional (or, if you stumble on them by accident, easy to escape). In an act of good sense, the random run in with convicts, high powered Psychopaths in the first game, are now merely low risk interactions with looters.

The second major change is to how all enemies, but notably psychopaths, act in a gunfight. In both games, enemies largely follow a script (with notable exceptions mentioned later). There actions cannot be blocked or interrupted, so it is not a matter of stopping attacks, so much as it is a matter of learning that script, dodging at the right time and then getting off a hit or two. In the first game, this was also true of guns, which was extremely frustrating, because all guns provide either knock back or being knocked prone. In DR2, however, there is a sort of built in interrupt with gunfire, where the enemy will do a roll to the left or right when you've shot them enough times. The videos below depict that with a group of mercenaries and with the final psychopath of the game. Don't watch the second video if you don't want spoilers (although if you didn't see this coming the second you saw the guy, I don't know what to say):





This makes all story missions, as well as the final boss, a world easier. Saving the survivors in the first game was fun, and if it hadn't been for the psychos, I would have finished it. This change with guns makes it possible to complete the game, and then go back and fight the tougher psychopaths with a much higher level.

The final change is the much longer attack opportunities with psychopaths. As I said before, most psychopaths follow a script, and you have to do certain things in order to get that script to give you what you want. Sometimes This means ducking out of the way of an attack at the right time, which then winds the enemy giving you an opportunity to attack. Sometimes there is a built in trigger to get the psycho to actually get knocked prone (hitting them at a certain exact moment, for example, or with the right weapon). But it all follows a script, as opposed to what I ws talking about up above. This was true to a certain extent in the first game, but the problem was that these breaks were short and minor in comparison to the breaks in Dead Rising 2. Compare Fatman here in Dead Rising 2:



Where he gets winded, drops to his knees and then you get to shoot about 8 shells into him, to Cletus in Dead Rising 1:



Where it basically requires you get hurt for about half your health in order to get the weapon you need, and then you get to shoot about one shot at a time (actual Cleatus fight starts at the 7 minute mark). The new psychopaths have spots where you can really crush the target, and there is always a way of defeating enemies with a fair amount of swiftness. This assumes you're at the right level, but I reached level 17 before fighting Fatman without putting an astronomical amount of effort. I completed all escort missions I had received up to that point, but no other psychopath fights. So while the game doesn't really give you the opportunity to control the flow of a fight, it gives you much better openings in the rhythm of the enemy to be able to take them down.

There is one outlier in all of this and he is a significant one. The final psychopath in overtime mode is as bad as any from the first Dead Rising. There is no breaks to his attacks that provide significant striking opportunities, you are stripped from the start of healing and weapons, and an additional time limit activity is given so that any free second given, you are forced to take care of that instead of scrounging for weapons or health items. It is a punishing boss, but I suspect it is a boss Capcom expected the player to fight the second time through the game rather than the first time through. That doesn't really excuse the bastard, but it at least explains it.

It's nice to see a game developer change something like this for the better. With all sequels it seems like there is a risk of making baddies bigger and badder than they've ever been before. Dead Rising needed a redesign of the enemies, and that's what it got. Now if they would only put Infinite Mode back in the game.

Opinion: Inefficiencies of Markets and the Exploitation of Workers

This article caught my attention for two reason. First, I had trouble believing that a person would publicly announce that they find uninformed individuals in the marketplace and exploit them. The business equivalent of announcing on a dating website that you prefer women just after breakups because you can talk them into fucked up sex. Second, I’m terrified that a 16 year-old could be so jaded and willing to do such a questionable thing. The core of his argument rests on a basic assumption, that capitalism is built on the exploitation of workers by paying them less than the value of their service. That is a common misunderstanding but usually among people who think that Capitalism is the root of all evil.

The assumption that capitalism is necessarily an exploitation of the worker is a misunderstanding of economics that is common amongst people who think capitalists are evil and people like Kaitol, who seem to think that capitalists are evil, but that it’s somehow OK. Marx explained it by positing the production of a widget. The raw materials for the widget costs X, the work involved in the production of the widget costs Y, and the ancillary costs of it are Z. So a product should cost X+Y+Z. So if our hypothetical widget costs $200 in raw materials, $100 in work on the production, and $100 in ancillary costs, it should cost $400 on the open market. However, a corporation will price it higher, let’s say $500 on the open market. Where does this additional value come from? Marx claimed that the additional value comes from the worker, and that corporations gain the profit from not paying the correct amount to their workers, so the manual labor should be worth $200. This is where the general idea of capitalism necessarily being exploitative comes from. However, the additional value comes because the actual product is more than the sum of its parts. The additional value is created by the corporation which is what allows the widget to be produced. That is the step usually missed, that the corporation adds something to the product as well (Marx also felt people who oversee others' production also do not add value, but that is not important for this explination). Saying, as he did, “When a company makes a profit, does it take that profit and evenly split it up among all of it’s employee’s?” is a non-starter. The profit is the value that the corporation adds to the product. There is a value associated with it, in addition to the value that the artist adds to the product, and I don’t think anyone would argue that he doesn’t deserve more for organizing the project.

The problem comes in when he says, again a direct quote, “This relates back to what I talked about earlier. If an artist knows how much their artwork will increase the value of the game they will then feel they deserve that amount of money.” They DO deserve that amount of money, because that is how much they add to the product. He states that “We unfortunately live in a market that is determined by supply and demand. Most businesses with the intent to make money will not pay more than they have to for a certain product.” and this is entirely true. The negotiation process is essentially a question of how much less than the added value the person producing the added benefit will commit to. However, this assumes that the two people inside the negotiation are operating in a position of parity in terms of information. And he knows that the artists are not at parity in terms of information. He stated as much, saying that people know about the marketplace for flash games will charge a high amount, because they know how much their product is worth. So he instead goes to enthusiasts in places like Deviant Art. Enthusiasts are better for him because they do not have any idea what the value of the product they are making is, and they do not live off of the income provided by the work. Particularly clever, he asks them what they feel is a reasonable fee, knowing full well they do not have any of the information to assist in the determination of a reasonable fee. The exploitation here is along two axis. The first axis is that it pushes the value of the art down in the long term, assuring that fewer people will be able to live off of the income created by doing things like making flash games. The second is that he is paying a pittance of what the actual value of the added art is.

He gives three numbers that are very telling. He says that a flash game can sometimes make as much as $10,000, then says that most people he gets of Deviant Art get paid about $500, and then says that most professional artists demand upwards of half the value of the game. So in a two man team where one person produces the art, the other the code, the added value of the art is somewhere between 40% and 50% of the final product. $500 of $10,000 is 5%. This means that a person hired off Deviant Art is leaving somewhere between 35% and 45% on the table when Kaitol hires them. No one, if they were aware of it would leave 35% of the value they created on the table. This, specifically, is why he is abusive. He takes people who do not know an industry, forces them to guess at how much they should be paid, and then makes sure they never know what the actual value of their art is, lest they get any ideas above their station. His suggestion that this is how supply and demand works can be tested by the additional information that the individual would need to be given in order to make a decision. A person negotiating a fee might leave 5%, 10% or even 20% of the value they create on the table in order to get the job, but no one would accept a 35% loss if they new about it. This is why his trick of having the artist determine the value is so clever. People certainly have the right to give up some of the value they add to a project, but they cannot willingly give up something they didn’t know about in the first place. It gives the impression of fairness while still exploiting an inefficiency of information.

Kaitol actually has a bosom buddy in terms of this: people who used to sell houses. Up until the 70’s, there were people in real estate who’s sole job was to sell bad properties to people who had never bought a house before. It actually happened to my parents the first time they bought a house. The house was built too close to a river, and would flood every Spring. When they complained to the guy who sold them the property he said that he was not required to disclose this information, and he was right. It wasn’t until the Property Condition Disclosure Act was passed that anyone in Idaho was protected from those people. And, in fact, the arguments made by real estate con artists at that time were not terribly different from what Kaitol has said stated. Kaitol and others would suggest that withholding information to artists is not as terrible as withholding information to house buyers, but isn’t it? By committing to openly predatory activities he is assuring that an entire industry of people cannot be paid a wage to work full time. This burden does not rest solely on his shoulders, but it would be hard to argue that he is not part of The problem.

After the Fact: Painkiller Resurrection

And so comes to a close the third of increasingly bad video games produced under the name of Painkiller. It's interesting how much love a game like the original Painkiller garnered. enough, certainly, to be able to produce two shoddy sequels. Overdose started as a mod, one that I had actually heard of at some point in the past, and I assume Resurrection had a similar heritage, or at least I hope so. Because if some guys were building this on the internet and then JoWood offered to release it as a full game, it would at least be forgivable.

The third game of the Painkiller series, like Overdose before it, is also supremely uninterested in continuing struggles of Daniel, and introduces a new character, William 'Wild Bill' Sherman (Not that Wild Bill). Bill is an assassin who specializes in killing international terrorists and drug dealers. On his most recent assignment he was asked to kill some mob bosses, so bill wires up a car bomb and waits nearby for the bomb to go off. But just as the bomb is about to go off, a bus drives onto the street. Bill runs out to try and stop the bus from getting blown to smithereens, but the bomb goes off and the mobsters, the bus, and Bill go with it. So maybe I'm straight nitpicking, but Bill, for being an international assassin, doesn't seem particularly good at this job. He sets up a timed bomb, but then stands across the street? He put so much C4 on a sedan that it also demolished a bus? It seems like he deserved to be killed. Really, the only surprise is that it hasn't happened sooner. Anyways, he wakes up in purgatory with the Painkiller in hand, and an etherial voice tells him he can still redeem himself.

Bill kills his way through a lot of the game and a lot of ink is spilled explaining an alliance between a Demon from hell and the angel in charge of purgatory. I say ink, because all of the cutscenes are done in a comic book style, with static images and slightly poor drawings. I assume that this was done because it was cheaper than actual cutscenes? Or perhaps it's jus because cutscenes in the painkiller engine are not very good. The original Painkiller's cutscenes were, at there best, poor looking, and the game hasn't gotten better looking as it aged. The end result is that a lot of events are described, rather than seen, and it makes the cutscenes boring. More than that, the writing is terrible, just abysmal. A lot of it has to do with, what I assume, is a slight unfamiliarity with the language of christian writing. The angels and demons in the game will often take on a lot of flowery language, but then use odd metaphors or metonymies. The absolute strangest one is that the angels in the game will often swear an oath upon the "Golden Throne" (Presumably where Holy Shits occur). God, in christian literature, is closely associated with the heavens, with pearly gates, with being a shepard, a king, or the lord of all men. Golden Throne's are not mentioned in anything, except, I guess, this game now. Oddities like that stick out like a sore thumb.

This misunderstanding of of language extends to Bill as well. He's supposed to be a tough guy, and so he's given a lot of tough guy lines. But these lines are written by someone who has, perhaps never heard a tough guy talk. So, the player is treated to cutscenes where a line like "Ramial became just another member Lucifer's Party gang" is read in a tone that suggests it is something other than the silliest line that has ever been written. But one line reading in particular holds a special place in my heart. Bill, all tough guy voice says, "Even in heaven, or your so called purgatory." Oh, Bill. It isn't a metaphor about purgatory or something, you're in the literal purgatory. Of course it's so called, that's its name. I like to imagine Bill on vacation in the so called America, taking a so called airplane, and eating the so called complimentary snacks. So maybe whoever wrote the dialogue just didn't speak english.

There are only six levels in the game, which surprised me until I played them. Most of them take anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half to finish. This is because the levels are huge. Whereas the first and second Painkiller games played through a lot of inclosed spaces running along a track, Resurrection levels are wide open, and the player is given the ability to wander around a lot. This results in two basic problems. The first problem is that there are areas in each level that have a lot of enemies spawn that will shave off ammo and life. But they are area's that are not necessary to play through, even though they have the appearance of necessity. Really, it feels like the designer of the levels wanted the player to explore but then the player is punished every time they explore. The second problem is that levels are easy to get lost in. Extremely long sidetracks can occur where the player walks in the exact opposite of the direction they are supposed to be going, resulting in a dead end that can take quite a bit of time to figure out. Of course, there are other times when where the player is supposed to go is so unclear that it seems like a dead end, and so choose another direction hoping that that is the correct path and then find another dead end. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

It's pretty clear that the Painkiller engine was never built for such large levels. There are times where the game will grind to a stuttering halt. It also appears to wreak havoc on the stability of the game as well. Resurrection will crash for no reason whatsoever. The size of the levels also makes loading times interminably long. Interminable can't really do justice to the wait. We're not talking about 30 seconds, or 45 seconds, or even a minute. The final level's loading time was over two minutes long. Also, god forbid you need to reload a checkpoint or quicksave. For whatever reason it seems to think it needs to load all of the assets all over again, resulting in another wasted two minutes. The levels also play hell on the pathfinding of the enemies. A substantial amount of the time, enemies will just get caught on some object in the environment. I complained about the stability and bugginess of Overdose, but I take it back. Overdose's bugs are like a fond recollection compared to this game.

For all the size of the game, there isn't anything super interesting about the design of the levels. Previous games put a lot of effort into making each level unique and inventive, with things like the Opera House or the Demonic Farm. This game has, a cathedral, a swamp, a medieval town, a woodland, and a seashore. All of the assets and enemies are lifted from previous games, making it not mearly ugly, but a hodgepodge of ideas and visuals from previous games. At least Overdose created some new baddies. Resurrection just uses the same ones from previous games, and often the enemies have no thematic connection to the level they spawn in or even to each other. I didn't enjoy Overdose a great deal, but at least it looked like a fair amount of effort went into it. I would guess that more effort went into the comic book drawings in this game than any of the levels.

The first painkiller was genuinely fun to play. The second had a lot of problems, and was somewhat boring, but at least it was interesting in some spots. Resurrection is a disaster of epic proportions. It is shocking that JoWood put out a game like this, or that anyone purchased it for retail price. Most amazing of all was that it was published in 2009. It's a game that feels like a relic. I bought this as part of a three pack, and in total I paid probably $1.50 for it. I want a refund. I shudder to imagine the poor soul who purchases it for $20.

After The Fact: Painkiller Overdose

Should mods that get a full release be judged differently, given some sort of leniency or understanding that is not extended to a AAA title? Should the problems that crop up in them be treated with greater kindness? After all something that is simply a labor of love, whether charged for or not, has a homey quality to it. But at the same time many games are mods that just got a full release that are brilliant. My beloved Marathon: Rubicon was a mod that never got it's deserved release, and I would judge it to be better than Marathon: Infinity, a game produced by Bungie. It's something I kept thinking about when I played Painkiller Overdose. There were several sections that seemed bad, too hard, or not engaging, and I began to wonder if it was fair for me to judge it. It was a game produced for die-hard fans of the original, not for tourists like me. Still, it's hard not to judge it with some level of harshness, considering I gave up 14 hours of my life to finish it.

Painkiller Resurrection is not so much a sequel to the events of Painkiller as a parallel tangent. Belial (not that Belial), a half angel half demon born of a demon mother has been kept imprisoned in hell for his entire life. He was kept in a cage linked to Lucifer's life force, and when Daniel kills Satan, Belial is freed. Upon being freed he vows to escape from hell to purgatory where he will kill Cerberus, a minion of Lucifer that assisted in imprisoning him, and Sammael, his angel father who let him be imprisoned. The first game had some very strange theology behind it, mostly because of necessity. The idea of "dying" when one is already dead was a very odd idea, as was the fact that Daniel is never given an explanation for his purgatory. But the oddities of that can't even hold a candle to demons and angels having children. So angels, the eternal servants of the Lord who exist absent time, and demons, the fallen form of those who sided with Lucifer during the fall, have sex organs? They can gestate children, and give birth to them, and have mixed breeds? Aside from the general, Immortal Gentlemen problems with that idea, why would God give them sex organs? It's an extremely bothersome idea.

Sadly, the problems with Demons having children is kind of the most interesting part of the story. There are four cutscenes. In the first cutscene, Belial says he will go to the black tower, kill Cerberus, and kill Sammael. In the second cutscene he goes to the black tower, in the third cutscene he kills Cerberus. Want to guess what the fourth cutscene was like? The gimmick of the cutscenes are that Belial is narrating the story of the events, while an unnamed someone leafs through a vellum bound tome which has pictures of the events taking place. In the abstract it's kind of an interesting idea. A warrior relaying his achievements to an unnamed third party. Mostly it's just boring. Static pictures depicting things that already happened in game combined with a voice actor I generally wanted to punch reading a script that does little more than describe things that are happening. On the subject of Belial's voice acting, someone thought it was a good idea to give Belial some hilarious one-liners that he will say again and again and again and again throughout the game. There are only about five of them that appear to have been recorded, such as "I love the taste of demon souls in the morning" and "Dun-Dun-Dun, another one bites the dust." If you find it inherently amusing that a half-demon makes a Michael Jackson reference, you're in luck. Also he'll say that 500 more times.

The games level designs are slavish to the original game all the while seemingly missing what was great about many of Painkiller's Levels. The original developers put a lot of time and effort into making the levels varied, each one having different enemies and style. This resulted in a game that was beautiful and varied, but that was severely disjointed. Overdose makes no effort to have a commonality between the levels, so the disjointedness remains, but with the problem that it does not match the visual tone of the original. Whether it was an opera house, a train station, or a catacomb, the places in Painkiller were unquestionably creepy. They were locations gone to dust, crumbling from war and disuse and in that way did have a sort of theme to them, which I didn't identify the first time around. Overdose's levels are undeniably inventive. Particularly impressive is a level that goes from a demonic farm to a meatpacking plant to a fast food restaurant. But these places do not seem to be crumbling structures, places gone to seed. They are stages, with one particular example literally being a stage. They feel weirdly artificial with no sense of grander or style. While there are some interesting looking levels, such as the riots or the carnival, they leave little impression once they're finished.

Most of the development effort appears to have gone into making the most punishingly unfair monsters that have ever graced a video game. Be warned, this was made by people who thought the first game was just too easy. The opening level had room after room of monsters that respawned and respawned until I almost had to play with quick save bound the right click. This is combined with extremely long levels, longer often than any that you could find in the original. one or two are mercifully short, but most are 35 to 45 minutes long. And that is just the final run timer. the number of short gameplay with a death and then long reloads push several levels well past an hour. I was playing on Insomnia, one difficulty above Easy mode, but the first two levels I, in all seriousness, checked the difficulty settings, wondering if I had by some mistake chosen extra hard mode. Extra Hard in Painkiller games is called torture mode, though I'd guess that it was never more appropriately named than in this game.

One thing where very little effort was made was QA testing. Bugs are abound in the game. Turning to Demon Form seemed to have some real crashing problems, as did choosing more than three tarot cards at once. Getting stuck in objects happened often enough that I rarely wanted to jump onto things even if I saw powerups on a ledge that I might have been able to get to. Also, some member of the staff has a serious cast of hydrophobia. All water in the game kills you, even if it is a puddle. The dead marsh and the forest, in particular had a constant issue where small bodies of water would be scattered across the map, making combat in them a struggle to not merely keep track of the 20 enemies that are chasing you around, but also to not accidentally touch a 2 inch pool of water. I can't believe that no one thought that was a bad idea.

There is also a new slate of weapons, or so the trailer for the game claims. About half the weapons are just kind of boring re-skins of weapons from the first game. The most gratuitous of these was the Bonegun, which was just a re-skin of the shotgun, but, I don't know, shoots bones I guess. Comically, half the screenshots in Steam use the original skins from Painkiller instead of the re-skins. There are other weapons that do not betray their heritage, such as nuclear waste gun, but they are surprisingly boring for as odd looking as they are. The only really new weapon of the crop that was interesting and unique was the demon head. Ripped off the body of a demon guarding Belial's cage, it fires a strange laser from it's eyes and shrieks on command. It is, admittedly, strange to find "ammo" for this weapon sitting around in crates, but it was the most enjoyable weapon in the game.

To be honest I think that it was kind of unfair of Dreamcatcher to release this game as a full game for purchase. Money changed the value of something, no matter how low the price. It also suggests something anyone should buy, when it is clearly a game made almost exclusively for fans of the original. Had it just been released for free on the internet it could be touted as a very inventive mod. As it is, it's just an undercooked release.

Opinion: The Engineer's Lament

The release of the Engineer update for TF2 is, in its own sort of way, bittersweet. It was the release of some of the best equipment for any class to date, but it also signals the closing in of time on the Venerable Team Fortress 2. The game is, at this point, almost 4 years old, and with the release of the final class update it is only a matter of time before updates to the game are brought to a close. There are probably only so many tweaks that a game like this will be given at this late stage, and while I look forward to a bright new future at some point when Team Fortress 3 is released, I still hope and pray for the one thing that was never given in any of the updates. Something that, at this point, seems basic and necessary and has only been exacerbated by the release of all the new goodies.

The problem can be traced all the way back to the release of the Medic update, the first class update. The Kritzkrieg makes the person being healed impossibly powerful. A single Crit Rocket from a Solder is powerful enough to destroy any un-overhealed enemy (except the heavy) and any level 3 building. So the six or eight shots that the solder has can break up a sentry with heavy and teleporter style blockade that is used in narrow corridors. But in more open areas with 2 or more sentries, the Kritzkrieg is a disaster. The medic buddy will always be killed, and then the assault is wasted. The Kritzkrieg is also great when used in conjunction with another medic using the Medi-Gun. Two teams, one ubered to take the brunt of fire, and another to fire off crit explosives. Both of these examples require the person playing medic to switch weapons on the fly during a game. So why is weapon switching in the menu, something I have to pause the game to get to? The loadout you have set up from the last time is the loadout the game assumes you will always want, irrespective of the map, irrespective of whether you are on attack or defense. The game has given specialized tools and assumed that we will always want to use the same ones.

Almost every class has weapons that are better on defense or attack. The Pyro's back-burner is often spoken of in rude terms on the steam forums, but that is because it needs to be used on maps such as Fastlane, where there is ample opportunity to sneak behind the enemies, rather than a map like Dustbowl. The Heavy's Natashia is best used in situations where it is vital the enemy slow down, so that they can be dispatched. A Heavy with a Natasha next to a sentry is brutal, and often assures that enemies like Scouts and Snipers cannot hector sentries with quick jumps out and in from cover. What it isn't for is assaults on sentry nests. The scenario specifics for almost every weapon variant could be listed in detail. The point is that simply having one loadout that can only be changed by stepping out of the game is bad. Worse it gives weapons that are quite useful a bad name, because people use them in scenarios where they are assuredly not necessary.

This problem has only gotten worse with the release of the Engineer update. The mini-sentry is an amazing weapon on the assault. It gives the ability to establish a weapon that will produce at least three or four assists if put int he right location. This combined with the Frontier Justice makes the Engineer one of the most useful classes to have in the forward position when the gates first open. But if the Engineer needs to defend a location, the Mini-sentry is not the correct solution. This is most noticable on A/D maps, where Blu engineers need to use the mini-sentry when fighting for the first point but need too turtle up and set up an away base to capture the second point. It is hard to find a clearer example of this issue.

The solution seems easy enough in the abstract, although, it is always hard to tell how hard something is actually going to be until it is implimented. I want anywhere between two and four loadouts I can populate for each class, and a button to quick-switch the loadout for the next spawn. All it would take was this change and suddenly variable loadouts are possible, and wouldn't stop the action. Obviously, the weapons that are most versatile would be in the first loadout. Medi-Guns, Wrentches, Etc. But it would change the language of how people talk about weapons that are more specalized. People would no longer complain that the Scottish Resistance is bad, it would just become understood that it's you're second loadout weapon. Two loadouts would be minimally necessary, but four would be great to be able to have slight variances with the attack and defense, Natasha with the Sandvich and so on. Then just press a button to bring up an on screen menu too choose a loadout, and bam, you have that loadout on your next respawn. If you're an engineer it destroy's whichever sentry that you had already built. It's impossible to know how many more weapons updates will occur for TF2, but Robin Walker has promised at least one more major update from valve, and they are also going to release the top Pixel Count packs, so more weapons are on the way, and the problem of loadouts is only going to get worse. A solution, any solution is going to be necessary soon.