So The Sacrifice is coming out October 5th. New achievements, new mutations, and exploding barrels!

Related to TF2 now, the polycount hats that you need for set bonuses are soon going to be craftable, Robin says. They’re going to be available through a special recipe – ‘something like two refined metal and a class token’. Oh, and the taunt glitch that got bombed out, apparently that wasn’t intended. They’re looking into things trying to re-implement the bug. Just another day at Valve.

Alright, first a bit of news. Here’s another Robin Walker interview. It’s about gameplay, balance, stuff like that. Robin reveals he’d like to do something like the TF2 beta you’ve heard about here and there with all the prototype weapons and stuff, but on a wider scale. That and they’re thinking of nerfing Natascha.

Now, have this vid I had a ton of fun collaborating on.

Community Fortress has an interview featuring none other than our favorite dev Robin Walker. Some tasty info is leaked, such as an upcoming optional lobby system for competitive TF2, tweaks to the item drop system to prevent or hamper idling, and others.

Slow days. Communityfortress.com has an interview with Robin right here. Of interest again is a tidbit of info on their new demo system. Read on.

TFportal managed to obtain an interview with Robin Walker a few days ago, and there’s quite a few interesting bits in it. Now the questions were asked before the spy update, but the answers were only received much later, rendering a couple of questions outdated.

The main bit which caught my eye was a section about a new demo format valve is working on.

Robin Walker: It’s getting close to being releasable in a beta form. The idea is that after you die or finish a round, and it was a round you were particularly happy with (maybe you scored an awesome kill, or saved the entire team with an ubercharge), you can ask the server to send you a demo of it. The server then sends you a demo that it recorded, which has the complete game state instead of just what your client saw, and it’s in a format that’s robust and won’t break as easily when we update the game. In addition, the format has a some side benefits, like supporting full backwards & forwards time scrubbing.

Awesome. Hopefully it will include something that makes smoothing less of a pain in the ass.

The chaps over at The Escapist have posted an interview with Robin Walker, one of the original Team Fortress developers. A lot of interesting things in that article, including talk about the spy disguises getting an overhaul, new gamemodes, engineer sentry changes, and more.

We’ve got several new class designs floating around, some of which we like a lot, but right now we’re focusing on the broadening of our existing classes through the addition of the unlockables,

It’s good to see that the main problem with the spy’s disguise is being addressed, anyone who has played since TF2 went live on Steam can see the way the spy has changed over time. There’s also talk about implementing new classes if feasible, but they first want to nail down the class upgrades. In my opinion, new classes simply shy away from the original TF concept, but considering Valve’s tendency to get things right, we could actually see a new class that can have a balanced role on the battlefield in the future.