Fortress Forever: Finally being released on 17 SEP 2007
Posted by inpheaux on September 11th, 2007 at 7:54 am
After years of development and constant fears that the game had evaporated, the team behind Fortress Forever have finally set a release date for their HL2 true-to-the-original remake of Team Fortress Classic: Next Monday, 17 SEP 2007.
Fortress Forever is a third-party mod for Half-Life 2 that started years ago because some developers got sick of waiting for Valve to revive Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress 2 as-we-now-know-it was still unannounced, and Valve was being incredibly tight-lipped about it, so Fortress Forever looked like our best shot for ever seeing old-school TFC gameplay come back to the limelight.
When Valve let the world know that they'd been working on TF2, the Fortress Forever guys stuck to their guns, and actually managed to rally much of what remains of the TFC community. And all for one simple reason: Fortress Forever would be as close to TFC as humanly possible. All the stuff Valve changed between TFC and TF2 (which really is a lot) will still be there in Fortress Forever. 80 types of grenades, redundant weaponry, bunny-hopping, conc-jumping, endless demo-man spam, direct ports of classic maps like Dustbowl and Well, and so on.
Whether this will work is yet to be seen. Mods have a pretty hard time gaining traction these days, and Fortress Forever doesn't exactly look newbie-friendly, as it's strongly geared towards hardcore fans of TFC. And seeing as Team Fortress 2 is slated for release just a month after Fortress Forever, who knows what will happen to the player-base of Fortress Forever at that point. Plus there's the whole fact that some of us don't think TFC was impeccable, and something that should have been directly ported. It needed some of the changes Valve put into TF2, specifically all the streamlining. Though, at least with Fortress Forever, it looks like gamers will have two options. If you want a hyper-authentic recreation of TFC, you can go play Fortress Forever. If you want something reworked in an attempt to be more fun, you've got TF2. In any account, this will be a showdown that will be interesting to watch.
In addition to this announcement, the Fortress Forever guys have released a selection of videos on their website, and Planet Half-Life has an exclusive first-look at the mod. In a week we'll see if it was really worth the wait.
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