![]() ![]() This community is all about the relationships, mostly between the male characters, and mostly written by women (as much fanfiction tends to be). So – TF2 has a huge fanfiction community. This is an FPS, after all, not a roleplaying game. Of female characters in general who are a part of the TF2 universe and revealed through comics etc, there’s a bias towards male characters with a similar bias in power. Are the numbers of NPCs balanced between males and females, and do they have a similar overall level of power? Is there a similar level of customization for the female characters as for male characters? Valve doesn’t bring the sexy the way other games companies do, and they deserve all the cookies for that. It’s worth noting, however, that the one in control of just about everything is a woman with super-villain levels of awesome who looks like this: ![]() There are very few actual female characters in the game’s canon. With some trickery, you can play as a female and see other female characters in the game. An enterprising individual by the name of Chemical Alia created a number of female skins for TF2, and a few other enterprising individuals did the voice acting for them. TF2 is also part of the Steam Workshop, where players can design their own items and submit them to Valve for possible inclusion in the game, and I don’t know of any other FPS that even considers doing that. One really interesting thing to note is that the game was in development for nine years because Valve spent so long on the design of it, and they certainly knocked it out of the park there. The GraphicsĬartoony, silly as all hell, and it’s actually aged pretty well for a game that’s six years old at this point. If the game pushes you into any particular playstyle, it’s this: you MUST work together with the other players as a team, or you will lose. Each of the classes has a personality and a lot of awesome one-liners that they say at random, and some classes work very well together. Like one-shotting people form half-way across the map? Play a Sniper. Slow-lotsa-damage-tough is the Heavy Weapons Guy. So, what to play as? You have so many choices, all equally good, that you can choose your own playstyle. Usually it’s a case of ‘strong against this, weak against that’, and it’s impossible to be completely hardened against every other class. Nine classes, hundreds of guns, and thousands upon thousands of possible playstyle configurations, and the game is so finely balanced that no one class or configuration is an absolute killer. There are plenty of class-based shooters around, but TF2 is the one everyone knows. So far so ordinary, you think? You’d be wrong. You run around and shoot other players with your gun. Unfortunately, the immature teenage boys remain. Team Fortress 2, Valve’s free to play juggernaut, avoids at least one part of that with a large helping of crazy cartoon violence, and doesn’t get mentioned as often as Call of Duty, for example. Hell, they’re not really know for much of anything apart from being the domain of immature teenage boys or a scapegoat for the more hysterical parts of the right-wing media. First person shooters are not exactly known for their feminism. ![]()
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