ETF Unyielding

[NeonLight]

By ktz

YouTube

YouTube

[squeek.]

Interesting. I found the editing to be really distracting at times and many times made it so much less clear what was happening (slow-motion for the setup and then normal speed for the important part? come on!).

Questions:

• Does the conc explosion effect normally look the same as a regular explosion?
• Would you consider these to be really, really good plays?
• Uncapped bhop?
• Engi is basically unused?

That video reminded me a lot of FF pre-2.1/hardcap, where 'good plays' really meant doing totally standard stuff but getting away with it due to luck/demo being dead/missed det/whatever. Even with no HH concs, those conc plays seemed really lackluster (I don't think I saw any tightly timed conc combos; almost always conc onto the flag -> bhop around for a while -> conc out), and I think it'd really take a lot for me to see a RJing play as noteworthy (the editing really didn't help with this, though).

Sense or nonsense?

[the_cake]

lol @ pendulum lava catch. I love that you can do work as o sol and pyro.

Did they hack HDR into this game? If not that's a srsly smart post processing algorithm.

[the_cake]

O is seriously nerfed compared to 2.0 ff. There are no hh concs and you have to drop the conc behind a wall (yes, behind a wall) or the conc effect will affect your movement/bhop. It makes you randomly strafe in either direction. You can still fly away with it but you can't just skim forever unless you can plan it so your exit conc can be placed behind a wall. There's a way higher chance of one of the front line catching you than in ff even now.

Basically you have to plan the o run to land in specific spots so you have a place to drop the conc and a good angle to fly it out or a wall so you can skim. Where as in 2.0 ff you got a perfect exit no matter what was going on as long as you can grab the flag. Also juking the demo with drop concs isn't very effective.

Soldier otoh can skim pretty freely, which is why you see o sols grabbing flags all the time. But you take a speed hit, and getting a slow class into the flagroom in the first places is a lot harder so it kinda balances itself out.

The game is actually really well balanced and is surprisingly different from tfc derived gameplay.

[squeek.]

Originally Posted by the_cake

O is seriously nerfed compared to 2.0 ff. There are no hh concs and you have to drop the conc behind a wall (yes, behind a wall) or the conc effect will affect your movement/bhop. It makes you randomly strafe in either direction. You can still fly away with it but you can't just skim forever unless you can plan it so your exit conc can be placed behind a wall. There's a way higher chance of one of the front line catching you than in ff even now.

Basically you have to plan the o run to land in specific spots so you have a place to drop the conc and a good angle to fly it out or a wall so you can skim. Where as in 2.0 ff you got a perfect exit no matter what was going on as long as you can grab the flag. Also juking the demo with drop concs isn't very effective.

Soldier otoh can skim pretty freely, which is why you see o sols grabbing flags all the time. But you take a speed hit, and getting a slow class into the flagroom in the first places is a lot harder so it kinda balances itself out.

The game is actually really well balanced and is surprisingly different from tfc derived gameplay.

Ah, thanks for that information. That definitely clears things up. I fully expected my thoughts to be based on ignorance.

[NeonLight]

Cake said it pretty well. I can give more insight tonight when I get home from work. Typing essays on phones suck

[FDA_Approved]

Damn, shots fired, squeek layin down the law.

All around good avi, but I'd agree with squeek some of the editing was distracting. I found it hard to tell what was going on at some points. I think some of it was just to dark idk.

I feel like in ETF and QWTF the solly is a O class based more around the uncapped bhop, with well placed rockets for boosting and escape. I think the solly would be a really cool capping class if it were more about chaining rockets together to where you could get an almost conc like run. With like wall jumps and pogos, but more sustained. Though that'd probly require reworking to clip size and dmg and other stuff.

I've always found quake fortress O kind of fascinating with the drop concs. But I think that's because a lot of the maps cater to drop concs in some form. With high vertical escapes and plenty of ledges and over hangs to drop your conc off of. I just couldn't give up HH and interuptable reload.

[NeonLight]

Welp train stopped moving so I'll do some now.

Overall I think ETF might be the most balanced fortress game out at the moment but it's a completely different style of balance than say FF has. If you play it everything seems overpowered but that balances out with uncapped speed and completely different strats. It's very common to play with 2 sol, medic and a scout on offense versing 2hwg, demo and engy. Though Etf is a bit more flexible overall compared to FF.

The conc effect is similar to Ff, a figure 8 pattern but as cake was explaining, concing messes up your movement, you have to hide the conc behind a wall to minimize it's effect.

Overall these plays are pretty high skilled, it's a bit harder to find better plays as their player base is even smaller than ours. I've seen much better stuff happen but they were not recording at the time or it was just typical 2v2 stuff.

As I said I'll do more later. Train arrival

[aleXtric]

eh

[homie in reboks']

Originally Posted by aleXtric

sigh

[NeonLight]

To continue:

One thing that I love, mainly for offensive soldier is that to gain speed you either RJ or nade jump. You can gain such a great amount of speed with two rockets that are both minimal damage (maybe like 5-10 hp and 10-20 armor each). You still come in healthier than a medic and firepower is amazing for what needs to be done (Soldier is more like a medic in ETF where medic is a beefier scout that can also kill if needed).

Engineer is a bit weird. The sentry gun has ridiculous knock back, the damage I'd argue is around the same as FF's but it's tracking is similar to TF2, which is almost, if not instant if it's already looking in your direction. An additional feature that ETF has is sentry cam! You can enable this and see what your sentry sees which may sound weird but it's very advantageous if you're away from your sentry but it's being attacked from afar. You can see where the enemy is shooting from and can comm to your team. Dispensers are more intuitive except for the fact it doesn't pick up bags by its self. When you walk up to the dispenser it activates, a screen pops up from the top showing all the current ammo in the dispenser and gives two options: 1) Ammo and 2) Armor. You actually pick what you want to withdraw which is a very nice touch.

One thing ETF pulls from Q3 which is a cool feature is selective ammo dropping. In the options you can select how much of each ammo you want to discard so you could make it so engy only drops say nails or any offensive class drop only cells. Have a separate bind for dropping ammo if say you're a soldier and your medics need nails you could do that.

There's tons of small features that ETF has that I wish FF did. But overall it's a great game, super small community which sucks cause I'd like to play more than just 2v2s. Would recommend if u wanna mess around in it. I can show u some neat stuff

[Brass]

There are no words to describe how much I love this.
The catch on eco is even more amazing than when I saw it the first time.
The dodging of stage rockets on agony is so sexy, it would be the yearly top viewed video on pornhub.
I honestly laughed out loud at 7:37.
Don vs vexillum on japanc was simply beautiful. It was like a dance. It left me in awe.

Overall, this video demonstrates the intenseness and skilled movement of ETF perfectly in my opinion. The music, sync and choice of shots was great. The only problem I can see is that even in 1080p you can see and hear some artifacts of the video and sound, but that might be just youtube being youtube?

By the way, you really have to have played ETF to truly understand what's going on in this video. So it's no surprise that it seems too fast for you guys. (Not saying that FF isn't fast though, don't get me wrong ).

Amazing.

[FDA_Approved]

Originally Posted by Brass

So it's no surprise that it seems too fast for you guys.

Ehhh, I don't know if that's what anyone was saying.

[XPelargos]

Nobody was saying it was too fast.

[squeek.]

Originally Posted by Brass

By the way, you really have to have played ETF to truly understand what's going on in this video.

Unfortunately, this is basically true for all games with skillful movement or difficult mechanics. It's really tough to make that stuff intuitive to unfamiliar spectators.

[Dexter]

I checked out ETF before I ever got into FF on a tip from being good at vq3 movement and I distinctly remember things being wacky different and no working master servers in the default configs and never touching it again

whats up with the tweaked 3w maps with different lightmaps?