people hear something's 'meta' and they stop exploring. get silly with it :)

winger and soda popper can be especially funny

I remember a year ago I used to play scout with baby face and speedrun through, I was so fast that our heavy wasnt fast enough to kick me out of the game. Works

i think people perceive heavy as being "meta" because he's easy if poorly contested, but there's absolutely effective alternative giant plays like pyro, demoknight and banner soldier
(but ofc, knowing that doesn't stop everyone else from just being boring and picking heavy)

my secret personal play for the past few years, that i don't know if anyone else has picked up, has been running jump scout giant and hopping over the trellis at mid for a funny shortcut/hidey spot, and bypassing the enemy giant entirely

I'm also not sure if anyones ever picked up that an engineer giant gets his sentry guns fire rate boosted (just like with a crit canteen, since that's the attribute we apply to giants) which makes temporarily running an engie defense giant (especially with something like the widowmaker) pretty funny against otherwise uncontested last pushes

map used to be really fun but now everyone knows heavy is meta so they all pick him. this is sad because the map was really fun using different loadouts for different giants, but now if you dont pick only heavy giant you just lose. i know its too late to make changes but yeah

Największy Polski Crusher

markiz: crasher wouldn't be nearly as fun if it was just a pile of stat changes without leaning on existing mechanics. a big part of the appeal is how the mode interacts and recontextualises loadout options for both being and fighting a giant. if you want a specific counter for the examples you listed, try going spy to remove the giant's support staff.

We didn't want to implement blind stat changes to some weapons and not others etc.
Everyone knows what crits are, you see the guy with critboosted weapon you know what it's gonna do.

I think it would be better, when giants simply have +200% damage bonus and increased explosion range instead of only 100% crits. This would prevent battalion soldiers and vaccinator medics to become nearly imprevious to any damage, and giant swould still be crit boosted, dealing even more damage.

This is legit one of just a few community-made maps after 2014 that's enjoyable to play. No bosses or spells that don't work outside of their original maps is one big plus.

would it be possible to give all giants a bottomless clip to even the playing field against giant heavys

I think we took Crasher as far as we could go with it (prototyping it for April Fools as "Big Boys", and iterating on that to create Crasher itself), and polished it into the best possible presentation of the concept.

Given that, I feel there's limited else to be done with it, as Pont mentioned, there's very limited layout designs that "work" with the gameplay, and its hard to bring anything new to the idea that doesn't dilute the experience or distance it from vanilla TF2.

I've seen that there's been some attempts to replicate its success but, without communicating with us, they've had to rediscover most of our design exploration/conclusions on their own, leaving limited time or options to adapt or iterate on their ideas to make them truly work.

(2/2)

In my opinion the VIP design thread ends at either Payload or Crasher, depending if you want the VIP to be playable or not.

The core of VIP is escorting a mobile objective into the enemy base to win, but it sucks to play as the one guy the entire enemy team is focusing. (I find ADCTF generally has this problem, as has almost every implementation of a VIP mode that I've seen)

So either you make the VIP a fun power trip to play as (IMO this needs to be balanced by being up against another, equally-powerful guy), or you swap the VIP for a constrained gameplay object (doesn't need to be fun to play as the objective if nobody is playing as it).
Obviously Crasher is the former, and Payload is the latter.

(1/2)

That's a shame, but entirely understandable, glad to hear your thoughts and opinions on the matter, I do guess it isn't exactly balanced, but I like this particular map not because it's precisely balanced but because it's super fun, even when I lost I definitely had lots and lots of fun and I found myself feeling enamorated with the maps' feel, the announcers, the idea behind the map, to me, it's a masterpiece, but I suppose it's better to have a carefully crafted masterpiece that's an one-off than a clumsily rushed sequel of sorts. Thank you for your words!

nope, nothing else is planned. we'd already be on it if there were more to wring out of this, but it's better as a one-off. an S-shaped layout is the only one that'll work for this mode, and trying to put a giant in an asymmetrical context wouldn't be possible to balance. there's not much more to do in this space!

as for VIP, well, there's a reason we've got payload instead.

Is it possible that more maps like this will be released? I find it much more fun to have a Giant in the team than the regular CTF, but only this map exists within the game. It's also noteworthy that this is the closest thing to a VIP mode that exists within the official part of the game in the map rotation...

YES

Do you mean a gamemode logic release?

can i have the mode thing pls?

@Delab Lefou Skill issue lmfao

ah nice

one last hurrah for the old entity IO system - out with a bang, hey?

It predates Vscript actually! All classic Hammer I/O using existing entities.
The most complicated setup is actually the custom announcer logic lol

correct me if I'm wrong but is this powered with Vscript?

adding bespoke rules for specific classes and weapons is a rabbit hole we're not going down. people seem to answer a giant heavy with another giant heavy and stalemate - try taking out his support with snipers and spies, and use the battallion's backup to counter the crits. :)

Is this map getting revisited and getting some balance changes? It's really damn fun but giant heavies are too OP and stuff like vaccinator bubbles shouldn't work on giants

exactly what i was looking for! my thanks
would love to see more of these characters, i love these silly fellas

@beatrix the closest there is to official concept art for the scientists is this:
https://i.imgur.com/w0QRgkY.png
drawn by pont after we finished the map

i remember seeing concept art for Freakinhuge and Bigginsize on twitter in the past, though i cant find it now, anyone know where?

this is one of my favorite maps in tf2. cant wait till october!

I miss playing this map :( . There doesn't seem to be any active community servers with 24/7 ctf_crasher.

This is a really unique and fun map! Its well designed and great to play on!

BEst map in TF2?

crasher my beloved

its all-year in my heart

I agree, i think this map/ game mode should be available in casual mode (as well as all the Halloween maps during a full moon). and besides, VScript will make game modes like this one much more common in the Halloween pool soonish!

haha, that would be really cool :)

"grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother? I'm huge"
"entire world is babies"

If this came out in 2013, they absolutely would've had unique voicelines for the characters being giant like Scout "fe fi fo fum, you all suck!"

THE GIANT GROWS TIRED OF VALVES INCOMPETANCE, CASUAL CRASHER NOW!!!

overrated imo

This needs an MvM reskin to let us finally play as the robots, pronto!

I wish it was all year round is there perhaps someway to revamp the map so its not halloween

please

Lets have valve add this map into the map pool

PLS MAKE MORE MAPS USEING GIANTS PLS

THE GIANT THINKS WE SHOULD PETITION VALVE TO ADD CRASHER TO THE MISC MAP POOL IN CASUAL

The only thing wrong with this map is that it's not available year-round.

I don't know if a proper navmesh would even be possible for this map, because I don't think bots can Understand the gimmick

Are you planing proper navmesh for this map?