TF2 has a lot of maps that we’ve become familiar with over the years. But have you ever taken a moment to look around and appreciate everything in one of them? Join me as I do just that…
Transcript:
This is a normal match of Team Fortress 2. And now… I’m alone.
Have you ever done this?
Have you ever loaded into a map from a multiplayer game by yourself and just walked around? It’s a bizarre feeling, seeing areas normally populated with players completely empty. You see the world in a different light and really get a chance to stop and smell the roses.
Welcome to Video Game World Tours. Today, we’re looking at the expertly crafted maps of Team Fortress 2.
Harvest is our first stop.
Everything about this map’s design is in service of giving off a “fall” vibe. Trees are barren, leaves are strewn about, suspiciously large pumpkins dot the place. It’s the traditional Autumn aesthetic.
I can picture myself in this map. Hearing the leaves rustle, feeling the cool breeze against my neck, it’d be a very soothing place hang around.
All the man-made aspects of the map feel so lived in. The buildings look like they’re wearing down after years of heavy use. There’s random patchwork on the roofs. It’s a place that’s obviously seen a lot of use for a while.
All that wear and tear tells a story.
The paint is heavily scraping off on this wall towards the bottom, where things would be leaning against it. The letters of “GARAGE” here that were once perfect are fading away. It’s a fun map to explore and look for little interesting areas.
Like these small huts. They have medkits in them which are useful during gameplay, but I usually run in and out of the building. It’s nice to appreciate them for what they are, just this once.
I’m fascinated with out-of-bounds areas in TF2 maps. There’s something special about an area you can see but can’t physically reach because of visible barriers or invisible walls. Let’s look at the area surrounding the playable space in Harvest. You’re locked into the map by invisible walls, but if you use cheats to get past the map’s defenses, you can walk around freely.
This particular path goes on farther than you might think. It’s weird stepping into an area where the developers just decided that it wasn’t worth it to model the backside of this terrain.
All in all, Harvest has a really strong aesthetic and sticks with me almost solely because of it. The map’s design as a level to be played in is whatever, it’s the flavor that makes it special.
(Interlude)
Next up is the ever-lovable 2fort.
I have a love-hate relationship with this map. On one hand, it’s awful to play on. It’s a capture-the-flag map, and defending your team’s briefcase is extremely easy here. Just a couple engineers placed around will make reaching the intelligence and escaping with it near impossible. It’s a map prone to stalemates.
On the other hand… it’s 2fort. It’s iconic. This is THE map that comes to mind when I think of TF2. I was playing this game back in 2009 on the Xbox 360, I can guarantee you like 50% of my time spent playing back then was as Engineer on 2fort. I have a whole section later on about my favorite spots to play as Engineer, so I won’t get into it now, but I’ll just say that 2fort is a cozy-ass map.
There’s so many tight corridors compared to the wide open spaces of a lot of other maps. 2fort is one of the smallest maps in the game, and it definitely feels like it.
A lowkey strength of the universe of Team Fortress is the stylistic distinction between the RED and BLU teams. Buildings in RED’s territory are usually built with wooden planks. They’re often quite homely and rural. BLU’s buildings are built with stone or metal. They’re very industrial. Seeing those two styles right next to each other is interesting.
If you have a keen eye, you might have noticed that distinction in Harvest. 2fort, however, handles it beautifully.
The map is quite literally mirrored, both the RED and BLU bases are the same in terms of playspace. But the styles are completely different. The inside of RED’s base looks like a barn in the middle of nowhere, while BLU’s looks like an unnamed warehouse in some random city. It’s crazy how the map creators completely nailed BOTH styles.
This winding hallway has always freaked me out a little. Like I said, this map is cramped, and this corridor is perhaps one of it’s most cramped areas. It’s right next to the intelligence, so its one of the paths I’d often take when trying to capture the enemy’s intelligence. And there’s so much tension walking through here. I remember getting stressed out carrying the intelligence, rounding each corner expecting a heavy to gun me down the second I come into his view.
Plus, it’s very backrooms-y. The plain wall and floor textures, the sparse lighting, the fact that you take three turns before you exit this path. It reminds me of Antichamber, if you’ve heard of that. I could imagine the game pulling a trick on me here and constantly looping this hallway, I’d keep walking forward and taking turns, yet never escape.
As for this map’s out-of-bounds exploration, there’s a fair bit to see.
We have this control center. It’s visible from the intelligence room, and it’s a weirdly open space for a mostly small map. The ceiling is really high and it has a lot of room between the chairs to the railings behind them.
And there’s this raised area on BLU’s side of the map. It’s interesting getting a close up look at props and decorations like this. You’re normally not supposed to be this close, but from here, you can see they really skimped out on some of the texture and model detail. Which is fine, of course, I shouldn’t even be up here.
The further you walk away from the playable space of the map, the more the illusion shatters. You go up here and you’d expect there to be a wall on this side of the building but there’s nothing. Makes you wonder if OUR world is like that…
Oh, and how could I forget the cow.
(Interlude)
To contrast the tiny 2fort, we’ll now look at Well. Well is actually the 4th biggest map in the game in terms of playable space. The most iconic part of cp_well, to me, is the massive rooms at the ends of the map. There are maps that have a lot of open space outside, but this is a man-made room, built to house giant rockets.
2fort is a cozy map, with it’s tight spaces and all, but this is comforting in another way. Some way I can’t quite describe.
This place is much more of an established base than the buildings on 2fort or Harvest. There’s all kinds of fixtures and heavy machinery around here. And once you step outside, you see why that is. This is a train yard. Trains occasionally block your path, and they also run through the map at full speed, sending you flying if you’re not paying attention.
Events like that make the map feel dynamic. It doesn’t feel like some set of buildings that were abandoned 200 years ago, it’s an area that’s currently being used. It feels alive.
There’s this little spot under the center point. You spawn in this room when you capture all but the last of the points on the map. But when the frontlines of the battle are somewhere in the middle, these spots are practically invisible. Everyone else is focused on running to the point, they don’t stop to look at some weird nook hidden away.
But I think it’s kinda cool. It’s dark, tucked away, cramped, what more could you ask for in a odd place? This is my hole. It was made for me.
As for the out-of-bound spots, this map has a lot of good ones.
Going past the fencing outside leads to a relatively uninteresting collection of objects. But this building is SO uninteresting, it wraps around into being interesting again. It’s a tiny little hut sitting on a slab of… what is this? The top texture of this solid chunk is wood, but it can’t all be wood. The side of it looks like… clay maybe? This raised platform seems perfectly normal from inside the map, but once you inspect it up close, it makes less sense. Which is fine, I just think it’s neat.
There’s a lot of hidden away areas inside the buildings. I’ll go through them real quick.
We have these bizarre machines inside RED’s base. No idea what these do, but they sure are eye-catching.
Just across the hall is another off-limits room. If you clip through and move close to this downward slope, you realize the corridor shrinks. It’s a perspective trick, so from the outside, it looks like it goes further than it actually does.
On the BLU side of the map, there’s this barrel loading area. It’s a quaint, boring room with a conveyer belt that leads into the next inaccessible room. It even has a little briefcase that you usually see in the CTF modes.
I love looking at the computers that they put in these side rooms. They’re tastefully retro and perfect set design for a room like this. They’re used all the time in sealed off rooms here.
Well doesn’t have as strong an aesthetic as Harvest, but I enjoy this map for its wide open spaces.
(Interlude)
Kong King is perhaps one of my favorite maps in terms of sheer style.
I’m pretty sure this is the only map in the game that goes for a city-like environment. Most other maps seemingly take place in the middle of nowhere, but this is different. All these tall buildings, neon signs, stores, this is a side of the Team Fortress world not often seen.
Now, it should be said, this map was made as part of a promotion for Sleeping Dogs, which takes place in Hong Kong. But that doesn’t mean that the map feels out of place or anything. I don’t think I ever even realized this map was part of that update. They did that good a job integrating this unusual setting into the world.
This map feels dingy. It’s rather dark in places, there’s trash on the ground, and random clutter blocks access to the side streets.
If you clip into those side streets, there isn’t a whole lot to see. The tall buildings obscure the sightlines outside of the map, so all that has to be modeled is the little bit of street you can see from inside the map.
I like this escalator. It’s cool.
If you look in the spawn rooms, you’ll see the familiar out-of-bounds room design from other TF2 maps. Some computers, a desk, the usual. A little bit of familiarity in an otherwise foreign map.
(Interlude)
I did promise earlier that I’d talk about some of my favorite Engineer spots. He’s my most played class, and I LOVE to settle down in some corner of a map, build a level 3 sentry gun, and just wait for bad guys to come to me.
First we have Turbine. This might not be the best map in the world, but its a fun one to hang around in as Engineer. The plain textures and geometry give this location a chill vibe.
Next is the final point on Barnblitz. Like most of my favorite Engineer spots, the map at this point seems to favor the defending side. The cart will be pushed all the way through to the end of the map, only to be stopped right before the point. RED team spawns practically on top of that point, so it’s really easy to defend. And as Engineer, I can throw down a sentry gun to defend most of the areas the enemy will come through. It’s great.
Now I’m not sure which of these next two is my favorite defense spot, they’re both AMAZING.
The final point of the second stage of Dustbowl is so fun to defend, especially on servers with 24 players. The enemy team isn’t coordinating an attack plan, they basically just run in one by one to get gunned down by hoards of sentry guns that inevitably get set up. This is another point that feels really in favor of the defensive team, at least in a casual server. And the timer goes really high on Dustbowl, so you have to defend this one point for like 15 minutes to win the round. I’ve really become familiar with this particular location over the years.
And of course, what would a discussion on Engineer spots in TF2 be without 2fort’s intel room. Like I said before, I spent a ton of my time early in this game’s lifespan playing on 2fort as Engineer. And a majority of THAT time was spent babysitting my buildings in the intel room.
I don’t know what it was about this room that made me want to hang out in here so often. Maybe because I didn’t really have to think about where to place the sentry gun? There were only two entrances in here and a sentry can cover both of those from any position in the room. I’d just put down a sentry, put down a dispenser, upgrade them both, then just wait. Occasionally I’d get some kills, but most of the time, I’d be hanging out with other Engineers. Taunting, shooting each other, building teleporters for each other to take. It was like the break room in an office, if you spent your entire day in there, just goofing off.
I’ll close out this video showing off one particular spot that always threw me off.
This little corner on the final stage of Dustbowl. I always found this little pocket… weird. There’s a health pack here, but the path goes a little further back than that. It’s an odd spot that kinda breaks all convention. It doesn’t serve any purpose in world, or in gameplay. So why is it here?
Who can say.
If you wanna see a game with equally as confusing spots, check out my tour of Sonic Adventure. That game is in no shortage of weird locations that make no sense. And I kinda love it for that.