Thats Right Folks! The staff over at GameHelper.com have interviewed VALVe's own Doug Lombardi about Team Fortress 2 and also obtained some new screenshots. When asked about maps for Team Fortress 2 Doug had this to say:

"DOUG: We’re doing a mix of old and new. Probably about 4 or 5 of the most remembered classics from the old days. 2Fort is one that will be in TF2, and Dustbowl is another we’ve mentioned. There will also be a handful of new maps, probably around the same number but that’s not locked down for sure. We will continue to release new and old maps after launch, just as we did with CS Source."



I also read that the Heavy Weapon and Scout will remain similiar to TFC, but new technology allows VALVe to expand on some of the other characters. Mr. Lombardi specifically mentions the Medic class:

"The medic, if you look on forums, was a well-hated character, but at the same time there were people who loved that character. There was some room there to maybe expand. Because of where technology is today, we can do a lot more interesting things with that character."

Read the full interview!

From Fortress-Forever.com:

"Yep, we're getting closer. We've finished a few more playtests, and we have more to come in the near future. All of our servers are now up and running again. Woohoo!

So, it's Saturday. As you know, the FF devs don't do anything except work on FF. Since everyone was so freakin' bored, we figured, 'Hey, why not show some more media?'"

You can check out the new artwork in their Media Section

From: IGN.com
"IGN: What about Team Fortress 2? Stylistically it's certainly a very different departure for Valve...

Newell: In the multiplayer arena we already have the gritty realism provided by Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike, so for Team Fortress 2 we wanted to do something different and not just a remake of games that people already have. We made the focus of the game the different classes of the soldiers, so each troop type has a different role that is complementary to the next. What's clever is that if a player learns one role as well as how other people play their roles they become much better player. That's because the game is completely dependent on teamwork.



We also wanted to make each class readable, even from a distance. If you see a player in the distance in Counter-Strike it's not particularly important to know a lot about that character. In Team Fortress 2 knowing the difference between a sniper and the pyro guy is incredibly important. That's we decided to opt for very stylized graphics, because the easiest thing to read from a distance is the silhouette of an object. The outline of the different classes therefore varies a lot, so the player can recognize the type of enemy they're up against even when they're only a couple of pixels high. It's the same with the way they move: the scout, for example, doesn't move realistically but his exaggerated strides make it much easier for gamers to pick out.

IGN: Do you think TF2 will become as popular as Counter-Strike?

Newell: You can never tell. We work hard and give the product to our customers. The rest is up to them."

Eurogamer recently interviewed Doug Lombardi and discovered that TF2 will NOT be on shelves by Christmas as previously indicated. Here's the relevant TF News from the interview:

Eurogamer: With Team Fortress 2, it seemed to take forever for you guys to even talk about the game. So firstly, why has it taken so long?

Doug Lombardi: Since Atlanta E3 in '99 when we first showed Team Fortress 2 as a very army-looking style game, there's been three iterations of the game that we built and sort of scrapped internally.

The most significant reason for that was the look and feel of the game, and sort of drifting from the look of the original Team Fortress. The gameplay in TF Classic and Team Fortress for Quake was sort of over the top rather than super realistic stuff and when we started to move down the army route all of a sudden it became really serious and quickly we realised we weren't building Team Fortress. And then at the same time Half-Life 2's development started kicking up and the Source Engine was born, and so that team said, "we're kind of headed down the wrong art-style path, and there's this great technology coming online that we want to take advantage of" so it was a natural shift there. And then we went down an interim art style and gameplay approach that varied as well from the roots of Team Fortress.

And we feel that now we've got something that's full of that true, over the top style, encouraging that style of play, but also one of the things we took into consideration was to give each class a visible identity if you will, a readable hierarchy so that if you're in combat you'll be able to tell from great distances whether or not it's a heavy you're about to deal with or a pyro - just from their silhouette - which is something we feel is very important to multiplayer games, and something we've always sort of beat ourselves up about with Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, where it's a little bit hard to tell people apart at a distance. And in those games perhaps it's not quite as important as it is in TFC, because those character classes are so defined and they're so specific that you're really going to want to tune your approach to those players differently than you would perhaps the different characters in Counter-Strike or other games.

Eurogamer: The art style is certainly very distinct, reminiscent even of something like Battalion Wars or even Full Throttle.

Doug Lombardi: That's one of my favourite games of all time, actually [laughs]. All our decisions are based on decisions by what we call cabals, and folks iterate stuff and will pass it around and evolve it and what-have-you. For us the art style came from many influences, from '60s graphic artists, from plastic spy movies, from some of the Saturday morning cartoons from when we were kids.

Some of those influences are pretty apparent, and it was something for us that really clicked that... when we're playing Team Fortress, and we're in a classic match on dustbowl or what-have-you, you go from those moments of total laughter and craziness to everybody being very tense as you're on that last capture point.

It's a game that can be very humorous and very tense at the same time, and we wanted to find an art style that could match that, where the players had characters that you could have an affinity with - with the sniper with the hat and the glasses and stuff. That's a character people could get into and play that role of, and at the same time it supports the gameplay style of being serious at times and also being very humorous at others.

Eurogamer: How many maps and players then, for TF2?

Doug Lombardi: It supports 32 players, and initially we'll have a collection of maps that are some of the classics such as 2fort as well as some new ones, and in typical Valve fashion, post-release we'll have more.

You can read the Full interview, which also discusses EP2 and Portal, here.

Valve has released a short video highlighting the character models in the upcoming Team Fortress 2 Mod for Half-Life 2. For those that have not been following along, Valve released a press release a few days ago announcing that Team Fortress 2 will be included in the next episodic installment of Half-Life2, which just happens to be named Episode 2. You can view the press release Here or watch the Teaser Trailer Video Here