Team Fortress 2 Q&A

Robin Walker is a legendary game-industry designer, known for his part in the creation of Team Fortress, the famous modification for Quake that simply rocked the online world. Robin, along with John Cook and several other of his Australian friends, coded up the mod in his spare time, and it rapidly escalated in popularity, overtaking many commercial products. Soon afterward Valve Software acquired the fledgling outfit, and Robin and John moved to the US to work with Valve on Half-Life. The rest, as they say, is history. These days Robin and John are still at Valve, masterminding the massively anticipated Team Fortress 2, as well as some other unannounced games. We caught up with Robin in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, where he attended the second annual Australian Game Developers Conference last week.

GameSpot: First of all, Robin, let's talk about Team Fortress 2. Are you coding another Machinima.com intro movie, with classical music?

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Robin Walker: Oh wow. I don't know, to be honest. That was really just a pet project between myself and Damien and John [Cook]. You know, we're now but a small portion of the team, and it's something I'd love to do, but it's certainly something that took a significant amount of our time, and back then our time was pretty much worthless. Now it's pretty expensive. So I don't know. I'd like to say we will, but it's likely we won't. Maybe it's something I'll do on my weekends with a couple of friends or something. Certainly I think we know what we'd do if we did one. We've done that much thinking about it. We know exactly what it would be if we ever do it.

GS: So is playing the commander mode any fun?

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RW: Yes. It is a lot of fun. We actually have a backup plan for that, so we're not too concerned about that. What we're looking at is, our view is that the commander really [takes on the role of] an RTS [real-time strategy] player, which is why we're tentatively calling TF2 a first-person strategy now. There's some kinky buzzwords for you. We really are designing the commander to be something an RTS player can move into very easily. The interface is identical to an RTS's - you can get in there. Everything they're used to works, like being able to hotkey groups of players, drag and select, and shift to do multiple commands. All that sort of stuff works, and we really hope to entice RTS players into trying this sort of game. It's interesting. I've seen a few stories recently where people are saying that not much interesting has really happened to the RTS genre in the last couple of years and that we're still making sort of similar RTS's, new units, and new features, but nothing has really sort of "woken up" RTS players for a while. And in some ways I'm wondering if we might be the first people to do that. We're going to present [players] with a problem where they have some units that follow their orders perfectly, because they're computer controlled. But they have no ability to act on the fly or change according to circumstances. And then they have these other characters that are real players who don't necessarily do exactly what they want but at times are able to react more quickly and far more decisively than the commander can. I think a good commander will be the sort of person who can vie those two types of units off, and from them produce something really interesting.