Valve has shed some light on the production of its (hilarious) Team Fortress 2 videos.
Last month, Valve announced that its splendid multiplayer FPS Team Fortress 2 would now be completely free-to-play, and released the long-awaited “Meet the Medic” video that shed some light on the game’s sadistic German healer. Suffice it to say that, like the other “Meet the (Blank)” shorts, it was pretty rockin’.
A post on the TF2 Blog has revealed some early drafts of the video, as well as some early-production tests that never made it into the final run. The initial plan for “Meet the Medic” had actually been completely different, as it turns out, as it was more of an origin story – something that Valve hasn’t really done before in these videos.
Unfortunately, while the accidental discovery of the Medic’s iconic Medigun produced some great rough footage (as you can see here), it had another problem: The storyboard made the Medic feel “weak and ineffectual” since he was having problems doing his job – and nobody wants to feel like their chosen class is incompetent.
In the end, Valve scrapped its origin story ideas to go back to what they felt players viewed as the iconic in-game image for the Medic class: Ubercharging a Heavy who goes and wrecks everybody’s day.
There’s no doubt that we probably got the best version out of all of the possibilities, but it’s always fun to look behind the scenes at a talented developer like Valve and see what could have been.
(TF2 Blog)
