Introduction

After almost a painstaking 9-year old development, Valve has officially released Team Fortress II which was bundled along with the Orange Box on October 10, 2007. Actually, it is actually an evolution of the core Team Fortress gameplay, not any sequels of either Team Fortress Classic (or 1.5) or the Quake version. Earlier versions of TF2 (Brotherhood of Arms) featured realistic modern military and commander style of gameplay, as shown in the 99's E3 and also the game was promised to be released in January 2001.

Earlier Version of Team Fortress 2: Model	Earlier Version of Team Fortress 2: Scene

Alas, TF2 did not show up on that particular day, and the news announced that it was delayed again due to a few specific reasons. I remembered I was dying to have this game since I read about the wonderful development of the advanced military FPS, a la Rainbow Six style series. However, I was really disappointed when the release date was postponed, and apparently, no more news anymore about this game. It seemed that it had disappeared. Like forever, I thought.

The reason the game was postponed and cancelled was simple. The realistic nature of the original TF2 concept was extremely difficult to be developed, and too many design problems appeared. One of the early concepts was the Commander with a Real-Time-Strategy view.

From that angle, the game lets a commander issue his/her commands to the other team mates to do specific tasks, just like any of the strategy games out there in the market.However, this concept was too complex and could not guarantee fun for the commander or the other team mates (players). So this idea was ditched, and the developers proceeded on without the commander.

Other than this concept, there were some problems related to the way real combat was fought - real soldiers don't want to be seen and they are hard to spot, and players must use tactics to minimize their exposure. None of this was actually the fun factor for the players. The fun in the game lies in the ability to make decisions according to what they see, and to do most of the fighting in fairly open spaces.

Hardware Requirements

Above, the minimum system requirements for Team Fortress II is similar to the Half-Life 2 series, but for maximum enjoyment of this game, you are generally recommended to have at LEAST or exceeding the recommended system requirements to run the game at playable framerates with maximum details. Any Dx 9 cards like 6800, 7300GT (not GS or the lighter variants) and above are good, but you are advised not to push too much of the AA since it is usually a huge framerate killer. 1GB RAM is optimal, and 2GB is suggested. If you are planning to have a cheap decent home PC which can works well with TF2 too, any new Pentium Dual-Cores and 8600GT cards will help.