Valve artist reveals unused concept art for female Team Fortress 2 characters - Sensationalist Headlines

[QUOTE=AaronM202;52714161]Plus there'd be issues with making sure all cosmetics fit both models[/QUOTE] I mean the TF team already don't do this so hey, not a problem.

[QUOTE=Gauzemann;52714312]so is there a particular reason why they weren't released/developed? was it budget issue or taboo?[/QUOTE] Several issues. Hitboxes would have many issues, you'd have to do loads of new voice acting, old cosmetics would need to be refitted to new models, and new cosmetics would take a lot more work to make because they have to fit on both versions of the characters. That's the explanation somebody (robin walker?) at Valve gave.

[QUOTE=Skyward;52714133]Reminds me of when TF2 had a consistent, gorgeous style. Such a shame what happened to it. [/QUOTE] Don't tell me you are not a fan of the spy wearing a green colored snowsuit, a skull mask with a moon flying around it while wielding a knife covered in christmas lights? :v: [QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;52714330]Several issues. Hitboxes would have many issues, you'd have to do loads of new voice acting, old cosmetics would need to be refitted to new models, and new cosmetics would take a lot more work to make because they have to fit on both versions of the characters. That the explanation somebody (robin walker?) at Valve gave.[/QUOTE] Well, I do think that those were concepted long before the cosmetics were even considered.

Here comes the gmod sexposes

[QUOTE=Ignhelper;52714343]Here comes the gmod sexposes[/QUOTE] Go with the times, that stuff is all done in SFM now

What are the odds of TF3 happening? Valve is the only I could see competitive against Blizzard

That blonde Scout is gorgeous.

[QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;52714330]Several issues. Hitboxes would have many issues, you'd have to do loads of new voice acting, old cosmetics would need to be refitted to new models, and new cosmetics would take a lot more work to make because they have to fit on both versions of the characters. That the explanation somebody (robin walker?) at Valve gave.[/QUOTE] It's worth the effort tbh. And it opens a ton of character customisation possibilities we don't see in the game today. Imo one of the major strength of tf2 over other games is allowing so much character customisation and creating a place where people have a ton of freedom. It's not just skins everyone else has that you pick from, it's a small creative expression space in the game. Sounds silly but look at how much people use their loadout as their identity online, and how youtubers define their brand with it. Having female models would allow for new kind of cosmetics, female cloth, jewelery....and Ik people who want that so bad. It's so sad they considered the idea and designed the character but never went through and added them. Tf2 would have become an even more welcoming place for more people if they did, and that's exactly why I love the game.

[QUOTE=Killajax;52714173]Probably to avoid unnecessary amounts of porn.[/QUOTE] You say that like it's something large scale content creators are actually concerned about. If that really that stops people from putting their product out there, then we wouldn't have any content to enjoy, cuz it's gonna get tons of porn regardless.

Tbh what I find a lot more interesting is the possibility that Valve was planning a [url=https://www.drewwolf.com/rndchar/]new 4-player coop game with a fantasy setting.[/url] [t]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bee54d2aeba5a4ffc45af6/59bf39cd32601e7e674008a2/59c2ddb92278e7d20c61f119/1506009795836/rndheroes01.jpg[/t] [t]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bee54d2aeba5a4ffc45af6/59bf39cd32601e7e674008a2/59c2df438a02c7ee965921bc/1505943368210/rndheroes19.jpg[/t] [t]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bee54d2aeba5a4ffc45af6/59bf26fb914e6bfb8eabcb4a/59c2df98914e6b3ebdeb0a3c/1505943453776/rndcreature1.jpg[/t]

I'll be honest, fantasy never worked well visually for valve to me. Their strength is industrial like environnements, representing rusty, scientic, real world/scifi spaces. Industrial design has been a huge strength of the visual design of valve games. They loose that when going for fantasy settings imo. I don't see as much focus in the art direction of dota, when I can pinpoint exactly what they were going for with Portal, HL, Tf2...because "fantasy" is super vague and a mix of so many culture and visual elements and fictionnal races that you just end up with a visual soup with no taste often, and no focused visual identity.

[QUOTE=AaronM202;52714217]While it probably wouldnt be a financial problem, they've already had a shit time with their current voice actors' schedules. Like they seem to always have some kind of trouble contacting them for lines all the time.[/QUOTE] [i]We are in the beam[/i]

I'd date the fuck out of the scout

I really like that female spy design.

It might also be because of the direction they took tf2 in, lore-wise. TF2's world basically became a massive satire of hyper-masculinity.

[QUOTE=thelurker1234;52714760]It might also be because of the direction they took tf2 in, lore-wise. TF2's world basically became a massive satire of hyper-masculinity.[/QUOTE] The whole soldier character is exactly that and everything he says is fucking hilarious. He is screaming on the class icon "photo" because he was screaming at the photograph that he's a hippie and should get a real job. Thats legit the lore reason.

[QUOTE=mark6789;52714365]What are the odds of TF3 happening? Valve is the only I could see competitive against Blizzard[/QUOTE] Although TF2 could still be way stronger than it currently is if they were a bit more active at fostering the game compared to how it now sits ages without balance, map addition or cosmetic patches, I feel like Valve has basically wrote themselves into a corner that prevents a literal TF3 from being possible. Unless they are just waiting for the Mannconomy to straight up die before making a new game (which would be ridiculous since it prints money), there is very little way they could readily convince people that have invested a lot into the game that they should abandon what they have in the previous game, even if they feel that they got their money's worth in terms of playtime experience. (Sort of like how it'd be difficult to convince people to leave OW for a hypothetical OW2 if none of their in-game purchases transferred over, except more extreme because the amount of years people have been accumulating TF2 items for.) If you try to make a TF3 that is TF2 with higher definition models, you basically break almost all of the cosmetics already existing and have to either remodel them each (with there being several hundred in existence) if they are brought over or unrealistically expect every single modeller to come back (including ones that have moved onto dev teams elsewhere) and do that for them, which is implausible. If they do either, then the complaints on TF2's cosmetics breaking the personality of the game still there, which partially invalidates the point in having a sequal to get away from TF2's flaws. The only realistic solution to sate the needs for an official continuation by Valve for the Team Fortress series is for them to rewrite Team Fortress 2 from the ground up for Source 2 (since the hundreds of patches have basically rendered the game into spaghetti code, which is also why how the software has become so massively bogged down compared to vanilla and is also responsible for why fixing some things arbitrarily breaks others), but that's not even properly complete yet so the liklihood of that occurring soon is relatively poor.

[QUOTE=Killajax;52714132]They look pretty neat, reminds me of when TF2 actually followed the 50s aesthetic.[/QUOTE] Yea dude, this hurts. I get their intention, but this is like if you had an evil ex sending you pictures of them from when you first met. Just to remind you that what was once your go-to source of happiness changed underneath you, and to remind of what could have been.

[QUOTE=zeldar;52714531]Tbh what I find a lot more interesting is the possibility that Valve was planning a [url=https://www.drewwolf.com/rndchar/]new 4-player coop game with a fantasy setting.[/url][/QUOTE] wasn't this game gonna be called "fairies" or something? i remember something like this leaked a while back

Ik its an unpopular opinion on FP but I'm glad we're seeing new styles in tf2 when it comes to mapping. Stuff like space themes, japan, reckoner styles (some of the assets are already in the game) etc. It doesnt hurt my enjoyement of the old maps that people add new themes, it's just more options. I test almost every new custom map reaching beta, and i'm seriously sick of wooden shack, silo grains and dustbowl textures. I want something fresh. And im glad that people experiment and add new props options to the pool for mappers, like [URL="https://tf2maps.net/downloads/autumnal-content-pack-v1-05-aug-3rd-2017.4312/"]Autumn trees and holograms[/URL]

Crossposting: [QUOTE=Chris Morris;52714845]Really I think the only reason those designs look good is because their aesthetic style is innately good. The fifties/sixties advertainment style is innately pleasing and societally we view culture from that era with a degree more reverence than say, the advertising illustrations of the seventies. But the designs themselves are by-the-numbers, mostly. Some of them, like the Demo and Spy, are stand-out and interesting, but the others look like generic as fuck triple A designs given the TF2 facelift. I mean, how many times do you see buff women in tank tops and tight trousers in video games? I can count a bunch right now: Trishka Novak from Bulletstorm, that woman from Gears of War 3, Modern Lara Croft, Tequila from AVP 2010, Faith from Mirror's Edge, Chell, Cait from Fallout 4.. really, the list goes on. And it would be fine if that was just the socut, since, you know, the scout wears a short-sleeved shirt. But then the female Soldier has a low-cut tank top with really tight shoulder cropping. One of the Heavy designs has a really short-sleeved T-shirt, and it makes you think.. hold on, surely we can do better than this bollocks? None of the characters in TF2 really look like anything else, except maybe the Soldier, who is trying to look like a WW2 GI in-universe. They have obvious visual similarities with real things or real historical illustrations, but they're all unique and recognizable. I mean for fuck's sake they're recognizeable as [B]Fucko Pops[/B] for christ's sake, so.. Why are the majority of these female variants so samey and generic? Are designers just that un-original when it comes to female designs, or is there something more insidious there? Of course not. This isn't to say that having female characters that bear skin is silly, but I think it's double-standard to have the female scout designs have short-shorts and then the scout himself wears track pants. FemSoldier has a disconcertingly low-cut tank top whereas Soldier himself wears a full field jacket and doesn't have his knob flapping in the breeze as he rocket jumps. Bit jebby. There's originality in some of the designs, but most of them don't really look like anything other than typical triple A title females with a coat of TF2 paint. Which is boring. And shit. And I don't like it. But these designs are eight years old, and dead, so I suppose in-depth analysis is pointless, ultimately. As we've seen with the comics, the TF team themselves, and their writers, respect female characters more than these designs show. DemoGran is great though.[/QUOTE]

I feel that's an inherently unfair assessment as obviously these characters didn't get to go through concepting to the same degree as their male equivalents, and that since we've been familiar with the mercs for over a decade, we're inclined to believe that they have more identity than designs that likely would have been able to get just as much polish and identity if this was a concept during TF2's pre-launch phase. You don't automatically have backstories within a bunch of sketches by default, after all. Had female mercenaries been completed in time for the launch window, I think they would have been just as memorable or moreso as later characters like Ms. Pauling or Saxton Hale are.

[QUOTE=zeldar;52714531]Tbh what I find a lot more interesting is the possibility that Valve was planning a [url=https://www.drewwolf.com/rndchar/]new 4-player coop game with a fantasy setting.[/url] [/QUOTE] Kind of a shame that he didn't add the date to these concepts, since i'm really curious on what time period they are from. Were these made during the pre-DOTA 2 time or after.

[QUOTE=Loth;52714982]Ik its an unpopular opinion on FP but I'm glad we're seeing new styles in tf2 when it comes to mapping. Stuff like space themes, japan, reckoner styles (some of the assets are already in the game) etc. It doesnt hurt my enjoyement of the old maps that people add new themes, it's just more options. I test almost every new custom map reaching beta, and i'm seriously sick of wooden shack, silo grains and dustbowl textures. I want something fresh. And im glad that people experiment and add new props options to the pool for mappers, like [URL="https://tf2maps.net/downloads/autumnal-content-pack-v1-05-aug-3rd-2017.4312/"]Autumn trees and holograms[/URL][/QUOTE] When people say they're unhappy about direction I think typically people are referring more to unfitting cosmetics than anything else. I agree tho, I think community mappers have done fantastic work really creating some different styleS within TF2.

[QUOTE=Erfly;52715198]When people say they're unhappy about direction I think typically people are referring more to unfitting cosmetics than anything else. I agree tho, I think community mappers have done fantastic work really creating some different styleS within TF2.[/QUOTE] I dont really get that either. I mean i wish better hats were in the game. But it doesnt hurt my enjoyement of it that new options are added to it, and if you truely care about the artstyle youd play the original maps all day with hats turned off. The game has change with updates, mvm doesnt fit the 50s aesthetic at all but it's a great addition. A few bad hats dont make all new styles of hat bad. We just need less bad hats. The brotherhood of arms is my favorite hat, yet it doesnt fit the original artstyle and im very glad it's in the game.

I can tell that the joke with Pyro would have been that changing the gender option does absolutely nothing. :v:

I imagine these were shelved as they didn't feel it was necessary, they already had their current 9 mercs and probably wanted to stick to them and make them as good as they could. Initially tf2 went for a very simplistic design choice and I can see why adding different versions of said classes to the mix would go against that original philosophy. Of course these days tf2 looks like what would happen if you ate it for breakfast, chugged every pot of paint, glitter and sheet of stickers at an art supplies shop and puked it onto a canvas.

I think an issue (other than previously discussed part about how they weren't in at the start so we wouldn't warm to them that well) is that, well, the female bodies vary in quality and don't exactly merge well with the larger characters. Spy and scout are perfect and I think the elderly demo mashes well, but the Heavy/soldier/engineer are quite unable to approach their male counterparts in this art (Like I'm sure you can do it, it'd be ugly but you could do it) and I don't have good feelings about the sniper. That and silhouettes might get a little harder to recognise if there's more distinction (medic might have a problem here) So female characters need to be real close to their male counterparts, at which point you've gotta ask if it's worth the effort. If maybe they did some characters only-female in the begining, that would've been fine, but the option really screws things Also I think some places get funny about violence towards women.

[QUOTE=Loth;52714566]I'll be honest, fantasy never worked well visually for valve to me. Their strength is industrial like environnements, representing rusty, scientic, real world/scifi spaces. Industrial design has been a huge strength of the visual design of valve games. They loose that when going for fantasy settings imo. I don't see as much focus in the art direction of dota, when I can pinpoint exactly what they were going for with Portal, HL, Tf2...because "fantasy" is super vague and a mix of so many culture and visual elements and fictionnal races that you just end up with a visual soup with no taste often, and no focused visual identity.[/QUOTE] You're conflating Anton with all of valve (which is ironic considering how long ago he left), and the notion that fantasy is a hard coded style and not an open genre is frankly stupid. Star Wars is more fantasy than science, and so is the Matrix, frankly. The idea that valve can only make "certain games of certain styles" is exactly why we have the current state of valve's catalog that we do.

[QUOTE=27X;52716576]You're conflating Anton with all of valve (which is ironic considering how long ago he left), and the notion that fantasy is a hard coded style and not an open genre is frankly stupid. Star Wars is more fantasy than science, and so is the Matrix, frankly. The idea that valve can only make "certain games of certain styles" is exactly why we have the current state of valve's catalog that we do.[/QUOTE] Seconded, Valve has (very apparent) extremely talented artists, I'm always happy when their work is released. It's a shame Valve has let all the talent go to waste spinning on mud for the last number of years.