This past week has been a good one for Steam users. If you aren't aware, Black Cat Games was absorbed by Valve and commissioned to release an updated version of their Alien Swarm game for the Source engine instead of Unreal. I'm not really sure how long the project has been in development, but I recently found the time to sit down with it and I found it highly enjoyable.
However, being a big Team Fortress 2 fan, I couldn't help but feel the game had taken inspiration from the best class based first person shooter on the market and re-cobbled the classes to fit its shoes. Alien Swarm features four different classes, each with two different characters for a total of eight characters to choose from. The classes are Officer, Special Weapons, Medic, and Tech and while the class diversity is somewhat lacking compared to TF2, each class could potentially be shoe horned into the game with the exception of the Spy.
The unlocks you get as you proceed through the levels in Alien Swarm do not pertain to your specific class, so there is no need to level up a particular character, since experience is awarded account wide. This is an interesting model because at the end of each level, you are presented with an unlock that may or may not be related to the character you enjoy playing. For example, if you enjoy the Tech classes, with no preference for the Medic, you will still unlock your Medigun at level 9.
Given the obvious parallels Alien Swarm has drawn between its classes and those available in TF2, such as the Medic and the Medigun, the Tech and his sentry gun, and Special Weapons with the Auto-gun, what happens if we shoe-horn the TF2 characters into the model Alien Swarm provides? Would you be inclined to play that game? As an example, here are a few screenshots of what such a mock up would look like.
The is a mock up of the class selection screen that you are presented with when you begin a mission. No classes ahve been selected, so all the default options are silhouettes.
Here's the entire team selected and ready to go. You can clearly see the weapons everyone has selected, as well as what characters. In the original Alien Swarm, the area that has Soldier's bio up above has the stats for the characters, but since Team Fortress 2 doesn't have stats, this is pretty filler. I would imagine Soldier would fill the roll of the Leader if shoe-horned into Alien Swarm.
This is the game presented as it is in Alien Swarm. I didn't have the means to add in the lasers that are present in Alien Swarm, but the general idea is there.
Obviously this takes TF2 to a different level, since it is no longer a first person shooter, but instead a third person tactical shooter. The concept would be interesting because it would be two teams of four (possibly five) going up against one another for domination of the map. Each game mode that is currently seen in TF2 would be relevant.
Whether or not a game in this style would be playable remains to be seen, but it would definitely be interesting. So, would you play this game?
