TF2 vs. Vanilla FPS

April 8th, 2008 · 30 Comments

Just about every game hits a point where they need to start talking about fine tuning the balance of how their combat works, and oftentimes, guns are usually brought up as the proper way to get the balance ball rolling. Normally, this is a pretty good argument to base a balancing conversation on, but typically only if you’re actually making a gun game. It comes down to a “narrow vs. broad” scope issue, which I hope I can successfully illustrate below.

Too often, I think we as designers rely on the ideas of how the different ranged weapons work to find where the damage models in our games should belong. Additionally, we as gamers wind up rewarding developers who keep making the same kind of gun games (CoD4, R6, Battlefield, etc.) that don’t differentiate themselves very much due to being mired in a “sim” mentality. The problem with this mentality is that guns (real guns, that is) are just too fine of a scope to use for anything other than gun combat balance. Let’s face it: they all do the same thing. They shoot a bullet in a relatively straight line. This fact rarely changes, regardless if it’s a pistol, assault rifle, or a sniper rifle (and even a shotgun). The only variables you have to play with now are range, damage, rate of fire, ammo capacity, and spread if you’re dealing with any kind of repeating weapon. And even then, when you get down to the brass tacks, you wind up with a graph that looks a lot like this:

Narrow Band Gameplay

I like to call this Narrow Band gameplay. I’m not saying it’s not fun. It’s just narrow. The weapons have their differences; their scale and scope are just closer together than I think people realize. On the surface, especially to a game engine and the engine’s rules, a pistol isn’t really all that different than a sniper rifle.

So when I first played Team Fortress 2, I was a bit frustrated with the way the game played, because I was so accustomed to this Narrow Band form of FPS gameplay. Sure, Halo had the Needler, and Unreal Tournament had a goo gun, but you could always just pick up another weapon in those games if you didn’t like the one you had. You weren’t forced to keep the gun you had when you chose it, and so the gameplay model wasn’t horribly changed from the Narrow Band form of gameplay. It danced in the Broad Band path of balance, but if you could find a gun that shot straight when you needed it, you could always use it.

What I found in TF2 surprised me to a great extent, and I think it’s why it has such staying power. They pretty much built off of the previous “team” gametype models (TF, Unreal Tournament) and ratcheted that knob up to 11. First, they seemed to adopt the Blizzard multiplayer strategy of “make every weapon feel overpowered,” and then they balanced their weapons in such a way that hardly any gun shoots straight, and then made you keep them. This, from a FPS design model, blew my frickin’ mind. That to me is the definition of Broad Band balancing.

Just looking at the damage graph for their game is like looking at a cartoon model for weapon damage (an irony not lost on anyone, to be sure):

Broad Band Gameplay

Take a look at the two different “Combined Experiences.” The typical vanilla FPS seems paltry by comparison. That isn’t to say that it’s a worse game or even a worse experience. I actually enjoy both kinds of FPS combat balanced games. But, I mean, dayum. Look at that TF2 damage model. It’s just so freakin’ different compared to the other FPS shooters out there (and no, Quake’s guns weren’t balanced quite like this). Weapons deal less damage the further the shot goes, some guns have a ridiculous spread/damage ratio on them mitigated by build/cooldown phases, and still others are completely useless save for a singular purpose. And yet, it’s a nearly perfectly balanced system. No one weapon in TF2 has any clear uber advantage over all of the weapons in the game (obviously, some have a designed advantage over another class).

But the amazing thing to me despite these radical differences in the style of combat balance, is that they are really just a matter of scale and perspective. So long as you don’t cross-over worlds, each system is balanced within its own universe. Essentially, when both systems are balanced at their own respective scales, they almost become the same system, even though they appear to be worlds apart.

Despite this, I have the feeling that the “Broad” style games are much more difficult to balance, due to the “overpowered” nature of each gun, than the sim-like “Narrow” ones. Anyone have any experience balancing both?

Tags: combat · design · multiplayer

30 responses so far ↓

1 Saxifridge // Apr 9, 2008 at 1:29 am

Interesting. I never really gave the systems this much of a look before. To be honest i didn’t really like TF2 at first because of how different the weapons acted. I have been trained to play games like BF2 and COD4, where you want to find a stable firing platform, squeeze off bursts of round, and lead your target. The game play experience in TF2 was so fundamentally different that I did not know how to recieve it at first. Of course it grew on me, but to be honest I find myself not really playing it to relax anymore. I think because it is so heavy on the team dynamic, that if I don’t have friends to play it with I don’t want to play it at all. I don’t want to be social online with complete strangers most of the time. I would rather be the quiet guy int he corner with and assault rifle dropping net-tards without saying a word.
2 Pijama // Apr 9, 2008 at 5:24 pm

Excellent post mate. The only reason why I don’t play TF2 is that my old computer would bitch and whine through the whole gaming session…

BTW, nice graphs. When you look at the gameplay differences like that, I wonder: “How the heck developers can’t see that you can actually INNOVATE the FPS genre?”
3 jake // Apr 9, 2008 at 8:15 pm

i think it’s brass “tax”

but I could be wrong.

solid reading, thanks
4 Project // Apr 10, 2008 at 9:26 am

Something COD4 did was change how fast you can run and turn with the guns, like the imfamos p90, you can move faster both on sights and not and you can turn fast, also you can squeeze off rounds faster from a sprint then other guns.

Don’t forget, I looked at your chart for TF2 and i was reminded of both a grenade launcher and a rocket propelled grenade.

And I know in games like BF2 bullets do have less damage when the get further away, so in the end, I don’t see how TF2 started this, I just think the did it better then some.

I don’t play BF2 much anymore, but they did something right to have lasting power, I hope to play TF2, looks very fun.
5 Ace // Apr 10, 2008 at 10:15 am

BF2’s bullet damage does NOT vary with distance.

http://bf2issues.digitalsoftware.se/damage_table.php
6 Chris // Apr 11, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Jake, you can be, and are, wrong.

It’s brass “tacks” and always has been.
7 maximus // Apr 11, 2008 at 5:31 pm

stumble upon gives you a thumbs up
8 Cloud // Apr 12, 2008 at 6:26 am

“No one weapon in TF2 has any clear uber advantage over all of the weapons in the game”

Well, except for the Soldiers Rocket Launcher. :u
9 Benny // Apr 12, 2008 at 2:30 pm

So, it’s much easier to hit people in TF2 then other games. Doesn’t make it better or worse. Just different. I find TF2 to be a bit boring, I much prefer the accuracy of CSS for example.
10 svetoy // Oct 21, 2008 at 5:12 am

Benny said:
“it’s much easier to hit people in TF2 then other games”

in reality it’s exactly the opposite. take cs for example, everyone buys ak47/m4 and takes out pretty much any target at any distance, hence you can clearly see the major flaw in weapon balance which shortens the games’ replayability.
11 Mortem // Nov 23, 2008 at 9:37 am

Soldier’s rocket launcher may have a nice bit of damage when it hits, but it has tradeoffs. You only have 4 rockets before reload, and reloading is slow. If your enemy is too close to you, damaging him means damaging you, too. The rocket can also, as they say, be seen a mile away. Take a couple steps to the left or right and problem solved. Another disadvantage is built not into the weapon but into the soldier’s movement speed, albeit, if I remember correctly, only a difference of about 5% from classes such as Spy, Engineer, or Medic.
12 John C // Nov 24, 2008 at 5:50 pm

Excellent analysis. This is the sort of thinking that we need to apply to game design in order to move gameplay forward.
13 Coheed // Nov 24, 2008 at 9:23 pm

Kinda old, but this finally made its way to Reddit, and they seem to think this is an unexcellent analysis.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7ffai/tf2_weapondamagerange_ratios_compared_to_that_of/c06ior7

Your point is somewhat solid — TF2 isn’t based on bullets — but your execution of the point is biased and unfair. You’ve left out many, many tons of things that make each game unique, and your sweeping generalizations don’t hold up very well.

Needs more science. D:
14 An explanation for why we like Team Fortress 2 so much | PC Game Fun Time // Nov 24, 2008 at 9:45 pm

[...] explains better than we could why we like Team Fortress 2 so much. The secret is the lack of straight-line weapons that I [...]
15 spitfire // Nov 24, 2008 at 9:55 pm

I’ve read the reddit comments, and

A). I don’t have all day to compare TF2 to every FPS in existence. That would be an excercise in sheer lunacy.
B). It says “vanilla FPS.” It’s an article that is tracking just general FPS trends.
B). Commenters saying I’m not taking into account things like C4 or Rocket Launchers or Grenades in games like CoD4 is akin to them admitting they didn’t read the fuckin’ article. I’m talking about primary weapons here, which is plainly obvious from the graphs provided, and you can’t take any of their edge case scenarios listed as a primary weapon in a game like CoD4. Seriously? Some guy is complaining about airstrikes and helicopters? Come on.

About being biased and unfair, I welcome you to re-read the article yourself, wherein I plainly point out that not only do I enjoy both kinds of game balancing, but that they are excellent in their own right. I’m not taking sides here. I’m just analyzing why TF2 seems so different from all the other FPSs out there.

“Different” has never meant “better.”
16 another // Nov 24, 2008 at 10:19 pm

All I’m getting from this is “TF2 guns aren’t very accurate but they still shoot straight. Except the grenade launcher, and Quake did that in 1995.”
17 Aragon // Nov 25, 2008 at 2:56 am

It is correct that TF2 weapons are different. I have about 3-4 years of CS and a few other FPS games under my belt and since TF2 has come out i have played that and that only.

Out of all the FPS games i played TF2 was the hardest to pick up as there wasn’t a basis aiming style. For example most weapons in each separate game follow a similar aiming style. I’m not saying there the same.

In Tf2 each wepon is countered with anouther. In CS for example this dosn’t occur. This idea is why the team part of the game is bigger in this game then many other games.

For example a pyro can easily kill a spy but a spy can kill almost all class’s. The idea behind valves system i believe is that every single class has a counter. From there updates you can come to this conclusion also.

They updated the sniper so that it did less damage with no scope so that scouts were more of a counter. This way a sniper is not as affective. Scouts can run all over demomen if they get the chance. Soldiers are the pyros counter.

Every weapon is balanced with another. Now for CS they don’t do this. They just give both teams equivalent weapons. Most FPS’s do this. Both teams have equivalent weapons to keep the balance but TF2 has an interesting style. They counter class’s so all weapons are tried to keep equal.

In CS an ak or m1 is way better then other wepons usually. Most SMGs for example. In TF2 this does not occur.

In comparison there both completly different games and i enjoy playing both. What this guys article said was that the differences between standard FPS and TF2 style FPS. He said they were both different and he said they he enjoyed both. And Yes Quake has the basis to the idea. Quake Arena and a few other Team versions of games ran along the same lines but never actually became as balanced as TF2 is and in the same way.

PS: If you can’t see the point of this thread you should either go back to school or finish school before you comment.
18 Jimeee // Nov 25, 2008 at 6:21 am

To be fair - I think the TF2 illustration is greatly exaggerated - particularly the size of some cones.

Also you have chosen the most generic guns in the first graph and the most outlandish guns in the second graph - this makes comparison inconsistent and so one can’t really base anything off your graphs.

I see your point, but it’s presented with a bit too much bias.
19 hcaz // Nov 26, 2008 at 10:33 pm

FPS Vanilla is fucking quake series and doom which had rock it lawn chairs and green aid lawn chairs. you are one bias fucking retard.
20 spitfire // Nov 27, 2008 at 12:22 am

Indeed, hcaz, I’m one “bias fucking retard,” as you so elequently put it in your own kind of ESL way, but at least I can still spell “launchers” properly. And also “grenades.”

I was going to block that comment just for the pure plebian you tube quality of it, but man, thanks for the laugh!
21 Chuck // Dec 17, 2008 at 2:19 pm

I agree completely. Having been first schooled on years of Doom & Doom2 deathmatch, followed by graduate studies in Q & Q2, with my post-doc work in CS, I felt surprisingly uncomfortable when I first tried TF2. “Where’s the bread-and-butter medium machinegun that shoots straight?”… there isn’t any. I resorted to Pyro as my primary platform for learning the game, because Pyro had the most vanilla and predictable machinegun-esque gameplay. (albeit limited to short range)

I’ve since grown to love the bold yet balanced variety in TF2. Having also played MMORPGs, I know that class balance is an elusive, delicate crystal that can shatter at a seemingly innocent touch. Thus, the balance of TF2 is an even greater marvel.

Vanilla is a high-percentage, low-risk play. Mixing exotic flavors can produce something truly special, but it’s also a low-percentage, high-risk play. TF2 is something truly special.
22 Mike // Dec 21, 2008 at 10:07 am

Interesting, but the guns vary much more than that in CoD4. Just for one small example, a Skorpion is able to snipe from about huge distances, despite being an SMG. The P90, another SMG, will have much more trouble doing this.
23 Megazord » Archive du blog » TF2 vs. Vanilla FPS // Jan 1, 2009 at 6:19 pm

[...] Article original disponible à cette adresse. [...]
24 Aka // Jan 2, 2009 at 5:49 am

“They pretty much built off of the previous “team” gametype models”

Is it you first fps ?

Make the same graph with Tribes or Unreal Tournament weapons (flak cannon, multiples rockets, combo shock…) and see for yourself.

TF2 teamplay is about things like dress up as ennemy, beeing invisible, help each other and great moves. How can you sum up TF2 gameplay with guns…?

And about the balance, that is always the real question in any multiplayer game. You should talk about the balance in Quake Wars (different gears in each team).
25 Jeremy // Jan 3, 2009 at 4:22 pm

“hardly any gun shoots straight”

I never want to play that game. Thank you for letting me know I’ve made the right choice up to this point.
26 Episode 32: Community Style « // Feb 9, 2009 at 2:05 pm

[...] [19:14:09] mooglepies says: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckA1LUCaUNE The TF2 Vs a average FPS article The announcement of the winner of the design a darwinian comp [19:28:22] Dezzick/Joe says: [...]
27 Chase // Jun 1, 2009 at 8:40 pm

I like how most of the people who comment don’t actually read the article.
28 jased10s // Jun 11, 2009 at 4:34 pm

Been playing fps for over 15 years and have to say valva really went to the drawing board on this one and thought about things. Every match is a fresh experience due to the diffrent combos of attacking groups using diffrent play styles with guns that can rule once mastered.
29 dmc // Nov 24, 2009 at 7:20 pm

This article was an awesome read.

Indeed, every tf2 weapon/class is countered with another.

Because of the counter class formula, this requires a team effort based gameplay. With an array of classes. An experienced TF2 player will recognize a weakness in the opposing team’s class assignments and choose one that will dominate.

If a person were out to play solo in this game, they must master how to level the playing field with their designated class-foes.

Anyways, awesome job. Great read & well illustrated graphs.

Just remember, people on the internet will flame almost any comment anyone makes.
30 J // Dec 23, 2009 at 1:22 am

There is no weapon balance in TF2. the revolver isn’t designed to somehow make it balanced with a rocket launcher. Someone who has 200+ hours in to sniping and takes it very seriously will dominate the score boards easily. There is no weapon balance, and there is no class balance. The game is balanced from a team perspective. Everyone can do their job and everyone has the same fair chance assuming both teams have enough players to accommodate the map. 1 on 1 you have a massive advantage if you 1. have a rocket launcher in your hands or 2. are ridiculously good with the sniper rifle. Following that if you have a weapon that spams bullets you will probably kill the person that doesn’t. Now, looking at the vanilla FPS, the weapons are usually stock so that 1 on 1 is more or less balanced (with the exception of double shotguns and all that nonsense) and sniping is modeled realistically. TF2 has varied weapons and having played the game for hundreds of hours i will say they are very enjoyable, much more so than run of the mill vanilla weapons. However, when you have bad luck with teams, it’s nice to sit back with a simple FPS and be able to accomplish something by yourself without switching to a rocket launcher.