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My first impressions (as from another forum):
Well what can I say... I never thought I'd be so underwhelmed about TF2. I was really holding back judgement until the last minute, but now I can simply go right for the jugular.
The pace firstly - it's pedestrian. Even the scout seems to be extremely slow. Next, the general movement and jumping. After you've jumped, there is a slight delay until you're able to jump again, so just to confirm, any kind of bunnyhopping is totally out. I tried strafe-jumping a bit, but it didn't seem to yield much. With regard to weapons, the major point is that rockets are about 20% slower I'd say.
So, what we have so far is a slow game, with dumbed down movement from the likes of TFC and FF. Oh yeah, and there's the respawn timer to slow things down even more.
The next thing I noticed was the fov. default_fov is actually set to 75. Yes, seventy five! And do you know what else? You can't change your fov unless sv_cheats are set to 1. Oh lordy lord.
What else... well, for all the talk about Valve revolutionising the game on both new and old maps, I really haven't seen it so far. I've just come off playing some lengthy stints of 2fort and dustbowl, and they play almost exactly the same as they did in TFC; for example, everybody spamming the bridge on 2fort and nobody actually doing any defending. Ok, so perhaps this might change as people get used to the game, in which case I won't dwell too much.
However, with dustbowl, which really can't be played in any other way, it felt even more like hitting a brick wall than it did previously. If you consider the fact that you have no grenades any more (not even the demo) to take out the insta-locking SGs and you're mowed down constantly bloody invincible HWGuys stomping around with medics on their tails, you can quickly work out how much fun it is being on the attacking team.
Before TF2 came out, I was open-minded about Valve dumbing the game down for the masses. It seemed like they'd formulated a good reason for doing it, and perhaps had a few surprises up their sleeves for extra content to compensate. To my dismay, there really is nothing new of note at all. Despite valve removing some key elements of the Fortress grenre, I can't think of one additional feature they've added to the game to put back some of the depth they have wrenched out.
I can even stoop to a graphical level to make some comparisons (which I rarely every do - gfx do not make a game). Yes, TF2 looks good with its new graphical techniques, but at the same time it makes things look bland in some cases. For instance, my opinion is that dustbowl for FF looks 100 times better than its TF2 equivalent.
There are 2 things I'm glad about when it comes to this TF2 release - number one is that FF came out at the same time, so we at least have a cracking game to toddle off back to. And number two is that once any player who wants a shred of depth or competitive play in their game plays TF2, they will be heading straight (back) to FF in record time.
I've honestly been hoping that Valve were going to impress with TF2, despite some of the negative vibes that have been emanating, but christ, this is not the game we have been waiting for for 8 years, I can tell you that much straight away. I'm really not one to slate a game right off the bat, but I've seen enough of TF2 to be thoroughly disappointed enough to make my mind up already.
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