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Ideas for a New Heavy Update

The Ball and Chain, the Counter-Sniper, and the Disc of Throwing: three silly concepts for Heavy Weapons Guy. Plus a bonus: the Communists’ Can o’ Pesto!

While Team Fortress 2 is holding its annual Scream Fortress event, it’s been years without any major update. The last one, Jungle Inferno, focused on the Pyromaniac, and at the time it was expected that the Heavy would be next. It probably won’t happen, but here are some ideas all the same.

Behind every set of unlockables, there’s an answer to the question: what does this class need? How would changing this class make the game more fun?

In Heavy’s case, one of the big ticket items is mobility. The game is dominated by mobility and healing. Soldiers and Demomen have the most mobility, followed by Scouts. Pyros gained some added mobility in Jungle Inferno. The Heavy Weapons Guy doesn’t have much mobility. The Gloves of Running Urgently do help a bit, but that’s speed which isn’t equivalent to mobility. Mobility in TF2 involves being able to get places as much as getting to them quickly. Mobility is synonymous with versatility, because being able to show up in unexpected ways is essential to breaking a standoff in the game.

The second factor is countering Sniper. An earlier unlockable, the Fists of Steel, grant some protection to sniper fire, but the Heavy has no offensive counter. In general, unlockable counter-weapons tend to be defensive rather than offensive. When they also have an offensive component, it is general rather than being a class-specific counter.

The Ball and Chain

A melee weapon with two attacks. The primary attack swings it close, with limited range. Having the B&C out slows Heavy by a third.

The secondary attack lets Heavy throw it about half the distance of a Demoman charge. He can then switch weapons and at any time he can pull himself to the position of the ball quickly. A mobility tool of sorts.

Implementing this should be fairly straightforward, as the Mannpower mode already features a grappling hook, and this would be a modified version. It might need a cooldown, and there’s a question of how to handle bad throws. Can the Heavy cancel a bad throw, possibly incurring the cooldown time as though they’d reeled in?

The main goal of this item is adding a mobility option to Heavy that expands the playstyle without being too powerful.

Can you imagine TF2 with Heavies throwing big heavy balls around and pulling themselves over?

The Counter-Sniper

Tight-spread, slow-firing abomination consisting of six standard sniper rifles frankensteined together with a rotating ammo feed and fixed trigger. Fires a burst of six rounds in a second with high accuracy, minimal spread, and high power. But it has a two second cooldown between bursts and is limited to 60 rounds of ammo. Features a loud discharge but otherwise silent operation.

At a distance, this weapon is capable of suppressing a single target, particularly a sniper who’s caught off-guard. It would take a lot of skill to kill the sniper, but this bad boy will definitely slow them down.

The main goal of the weapon is to provide a way to focus snipers (and to a lesser extent sentries). A weak weapon for close and medium range combat, stinging but not high-damage, Heavy should carry a secondary weapon. At close range it also has a weak airblast-type effect when fired, capable of reflecting projectiles but not pushing enemies quite as much as the Pyro’s does.

Can you imagine TF2 with Heavies having a slow blast cannon?

The Disc of Throwing

A secondary weapon, throw the frisbee and watch as it follows a shallow ballistic trajectory. On contact, it marks enemies for mini-crits. A rechargable/ammoless item, it can ricochet off of enemies and bounce between multiple in a group.

It also distracts sentries. When sentries spot a frisbee, they give it priority and lock on. Until the frisbee is destroyed, the enemy has a chance to sneak past or attack the sentry. It can withstand only a brief attack, whether from a sentry or a player.

Enemy airblast changes ownership of frisbee/sends it back as expected. In addition, both friendly and enemy melee attacks on a flying frisbee will redeploy it (similar to airblast). A five second cooldown penalty is added if the frisbee lands outside of reachable parts of the map.

The frisbee will encourage Valve to add the tenth class: Dog.

Can you imagine TF2 with a bunch of frisbees flying around?

The Communists’ Can o’ Pesto

What Heavy update would be complete without a new lunchbox item? Not this one, that’s for sure! The Communist Can o’ Pesto is a saucecan that even the Spy would kill for. Dropped, it acts as a small healthkit, but when consumed by Heavy, it drops his health down to half of normal, shrinks him to half-size, and triples his speed. He is small-Italian-Plumber for ten seconds!

An alternative to the Ball and Chain, if small-Heavy gets touched by an enemy it’s insta-death, but if he lands on their head, they die! (Might need tweaking—make it damaging but not lethal?) Has the ability to jump slightly higher than mercenary-height.

Can you imagine TF2 with a bunch of small Heavies running around trying to jump on each others’ heads?


There are other possibilities. What new weapons do you think the Heavy Weapons Guy should have?

On Interactive Art and Game Loops

Interactive art and narrative games can, should coexist with more traditional game loops.

I’ve played several narrative games like Gone Home, The Witness, and now Sunset. You can probably throw The Beginner’s Guide, The Stanley Parable, and Kairo in the mix for good measure. There’s also Firewatch and Kentucky Route Zero, Tacoma and The Station and Ether One and Event[0].

Some call them walking simulations. Others lean toward narrative games or (my preference:) interactive art. What are they? They are basically exploration games with limited interactivity, focusing more about unfurling a narrative based on the environment over time.

There’s obviously a division between games like Gone Home and Sunset on one hand, versus The Witness which feature a bit more activity. The more active ones do have have puzzles, yes, but they are very much still about the environment and the world and the story behind the world more than the puzzles.

They are also stronger games. The puzzle elements add rather than distract. But there’s an open question about what direction these types of games can take. Unlike more developed genres, which have learned what works, the narrative game still needs some work (as do some other genres, including horror) to become more broadly accessible.

There’s always the question: does that space really exists beyond the known? Maybe it’s not really there. Maybe there are limits to gameplay that constrain interactive art. Adding more gameplay might limit narration, or at least make a game too much for both audiences. Is it a dead end or is there a path between the trees?

The Witness takes one approach, which is to fill the narrative with puzzles, in its case mazes. It’s definitely a game, it has a narrative, it turns the gameworld inside out by making the world part of its puzzles in new ways. But at the end of the day, the puzzle elements and the world are still divorced in a real sense that puzzles in other game-games like Half-Life 2 aren’t, because they are abstract puzzles presented as attachments to a world that could exist without them, where Half-Life-series puzzles are meant to fit the logic and depend on the world being a certain way.

Most games in the genre go the other way, which is to have minimal puzzles, focus on the storytelling, perhaps in a unique way like in Sunset. There you are confined to a luxury apartment for an hour of cleaning every week or so, during which the world outside reveals itself: a political revolution.

Does it have to be that way? Tacked-on puzzles or none at all? Are the game designers missing possible gameplay loops? It seems so. But the other question is whether it’s out of lack of imagination, worry that it will taint the narrative, or simply the fact that the types of developers who will undertake interactive art aren’t interested in including a traditional grind or gameplay loop.

There’s the question of where to draw the line. Kona shared some elements with the others, but I considered it more like a first-person adventure game, more like point-and-click games than a walking simulator. On the other hand, traditional adventure games also lack the kind of gameplay loop that gives simpler games replayability and staying power beyond their stories.


Running around and killing enemies is fun. Farming and fishing in a game like Stardew Valley is fun. You can do it over and over and over, and it feels rewarding long after the story has fallen away. That doesn’t mean every narrative game or piece of interactive art must have them, but it does mean the developers need to strongly consider it, if only for the commercial success of their games.

Some of them probably did, and they either chose the art path or couldn’t find a good loop to work into the game. But it should be a choice for interactive art, and not a default that never considered the alternative. The lesson of games is pretty clear on this point: players really like the loop. People can deride it as a Skinner box, but it’s compelling, it’s activating part of our brains in a way that most activities don’t. The day that school is as compelling to students as some games are to some players, it will be a rocket-jump for mankind.

So the natural question is what kinds of loops would work? And that’s part of the problem with lots of interactive art: they haven’t explored it. They haven’t put loops in their games to see how they do. The Witness is an exception and it’s exceptional, even as the mazes mostly feel artificial in an organic world. The post-end-game challenge really adds to the effect of making a narrative game feel like it has a game-loop backbone to it. It’s a cool game and it pulls it off.

Sunset is a nice piece of interactive art that apparently didn’t sell well, even though it’s a good game. But it doesn’t have the same kind of game currency as something like The Witness for its lack of a loop and, perhaps, for staring too long at a fictionalized version of history.

If Sunset had included the actual tasks, swinging a broom and a Surgeon Simulator floating Thing-from-The-Addams-Family hand stacking books, it probably would have done better. People like to feel they’re more active in the world, even if it’s fairly limited. A game should not be an art museum, where the player is not allowed to touch. If the player wants to dirty up your pretty world, that’s on them; you should afford them that chance.

Foyer bathroom of the house in Gone Home, with a littering of game items filling the floor.
Foyer bathroom of the house in Gone Home, with a littering of game items filling the floor.

Back when I played Gone Home, I actually spent an hour or so carting almost every object into the front bathroom, and I had fun doing it! While that game had the ability to move objects, at least having the ability to pick up reasonably-sized objects and move them around, which many games now feature, should be a basic part of any environmentally beautiful game. But I think Gone Home‘s ability to move them too, deserves the default spot.

One way to go is art itself as a loop. Passpartout: The Starving Artist made art their entire gameplay loop. It was fun, but to some extent the judgmental buyers dampened my creativity. I often had to think about what would sell and focus on that over trying to make a thing I’d like. Terraria provides a counterpoint, in which the creative aspects are built into a more traditional gameplay system of fighting. But in any case, creation is a decent loop that could be added in with most narrative and interactive art games.

For Sunset that might have meant letting the player rearrange the art and furniture in the apartment, or even create some art to hang up themselves. Even limited creative input helped some, when you could choose whether to put up wallpaper or a paint a plain color, offered some slight feeling of agency. But it lacked any kind of complexity, remained a binary choice. Worse for that game was the fact you did get to influence the apartment’s look and feel, but each choice played into the relationship with the employer, which meant a kind of built-in judgment with every choice.


In general, adding choice to games makes them better. Some choices can have consequences, but some should be just for fun. And other choices are about making your game more accessible. A game that was too hard for my taste like Airscape: The Fall of Gravity would have been 100× better for me if they had included a lower difficulty. Some developers do this. Amnesia: Rebirth includes a softer version for people who want to enjoy the story without the horror, for example. The Long Dark has a ton of customization for its survival mode, and it serves the game very well to do so.

The more variation your game can exhibit, the more potential it has with the widest audience. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it opens up possibility. When you add concerns like accessibility and customers who have limited time to play, you have every reason to let the game conform to the player rather than expecting the player to conform. (On the other hand, various data show that lots of people don’t play all the games they buy, at least on Steam. That’s a harder fact to deal with; should game developers actively court people who will buy and not play their game?!)

At a time when many games try to offer all sorts of customizations—clothing, hairstyles, base building, all sorts—interactive art game developers should grab some of those tools and add them in. Let players feel the fun of a gameplay loop while they explore, simulate walking, follow the linear narrative path. Let them plant a small garden, rake a rock garden, or stack books. Let them do more!

A Small Gallery from Playing Passpartout

Some art made playing the game Passpartout.

Passpartout: The Starving Artist (Steam: Passpartout) is a simulation game about being an artist. You paint using simple tools and put your paintings up for sale to be evaluated by different classes of picky customers. As you progress, you specialize in some kind of art or other. It’s a fun game, with some unknown evaluation criteria. One of the undersung aspects of gaming is as an outlet for player creativity, and I like that about this game. Out of 570 images I created, here are ten I liked the best. (Most were pretty crude, even compared to these, and there were way too many “expressionist” paintings…)

A flower whose petals are also a pink butterfly, with an orange watering can's spout barely visible on the right edge.
A flower whose petals are also a pink butterfly, with an orange watering can’s spout barely visible on the right edge.
Horizontal sections of a light green, outlined in black, stand out from background of yellow, except for one orange section.
Horizontal sections of a light green, outlined in black, stand out from background of yellow, except for one orange section.
A replica of loose leaf paper with blue horizontal lines and red vertical margin line offsetting the binder holes. In the main, a crude drawing of an airplane that inexplicably has both a nose propeller and tail jets.
A replica of loose leaf paper with blue horizontal lines and red vertical margin line offsetting the binder holes. In the main, a crude drawing of an airplane that inexplicably has both a nose propeller and tail jets.
Somewhat abstract overhead view of a grand piano with two rows of keys.
Somewhat abstract overhead view of a grand piano with two rows of keys.
Somewhat minimalist overhead view of a beach with red-and-white striped towel on the sand and a rowboat in the water.
Somewhat minimalist overhead view of a beach with red-and-white striped towel on the sand and a rowboat in the water.
White flower with pink center.
White flower with pink center.
An orange pear.
An orange pear.
From my expressionist phase, many bright horizontal lines overlapping, mainly in yellows and pinks and greens.
From my expressionist phase, many bright horizontal lines overlapping, mainly in yellows and pinks and greens.
Possibly intestines, in orange, gold, and yellow. (I recall this painting did not sell well.)
Possibly intestines, in orange, gold, and yellow. (I recall this painting did not sell well.)
Minimalist. Kind of looks like it may have to do with chickens or roosters. Bright red blobs at the top over a pink outline of unknown representation.
Minimalist. Kind of looks like it may have to do with chickens or roosters. Bright red blobs at the top over a pink outline of unknown representation.