Team Fortress 2 designer Jakob Jungels recently updated the official TF2 blog with exciting information: beginning with the next game update, the team will unveil new environments created using a new toolset.The decision to create new item types came from the variety of character achievements introduced in the last couple of upgrades. As achievement details become more involved, the designers wanted great environment diversity to spice up the gameplay. "As we create more and more maps with these achievement packs," Jungels wrote, "we want our level designers to have more to work with in terms of giving their settings a unique look."In order to diversity new levels, the Team Fortress 2 designers asked themselves questions concerning matters such as how to evolve existing assets without creating too many new set pieces (thereby increasing development time), creating unique experiences, and how to ensure environment versatility so that only important changes, rather than time-consuming superficial details, are made in future updates....

Team Fortress 2 is one of the most enduringly great multiplayer shooters of all time. This is in no small way a result of the many frequent updates the game receives to fix glitches, balance maps, and just in general make the game better. Another update has been released, and this one fixes a lot of problems. Some example of the things fixed are: Players can no longer fire through grates, walls, or other thin obstacles Players killing themselves now gives the kill credit to the last player that damaged them Kritzkrieg now works on servers with criticals turned off Backburner no longer gives a health bonus This is only a small sample of the bountiful fixes and tweaks in the new update. To download the patch, simply log on to Steam. Full patch notes can be found at Steam's site....

With E3 going on, it's possible that the Big Download staff has spent more time watching videos of upcoming games than playing current ones. But the weekend is finally here, and we're looking forward to getting some time that's hands-on instead of just eyes-on with our favorite hobby. Lead blogger David Craddock will be taking a break from almost single-handedly holding the site together while John Callaham has been at E3 to play Final DOOM (a classic!) on his PC and Civilization Revolution on his Xbox 360. James Murff will be taking a break from his usual indie fare to play Team Fortress 2 and Company of Heroes with his buddies. When they're not around, he'll be laying the SMACdown with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Eli Shayotovich is going to be lopping off limbs in Age of Conan. Lastly, I'm in the middle of moving halfway across the continent, and I had to ship my desktop via UPS ground, so only my notebook is gonna be accessible over the next few days. Therefore low spec games are the flavor of the weekend -- Sam & Max Episode 4 and Fallout. I'm also going to be playing a bit of Rule of Rose on the PS2 (well, technically PS3). But that's us. How about you? What aRe yoU Playing?...

Ah, E3. The time of year when game writers go into overdrive. The next week ahead will involve long nights, lots of transcription, and spending quality time with the lovely and talented C8H10N4O2 -- caffeine. We here at Big Download will be no exception to this, and as such, we bring you the E3 roundup for WRUP; the "dude, where's my plane" edition.Our fearless Managing Editor, Steven Wong suggested a networked game of Diablo II before we all jumped on planes this weekend, but several of us who still had packing to do just looked at him funny. As such, he's been hanging out in Civ4 and City of Heroes. John Callaham figured he'd take the "jump in, frag someone, jump out" route and opted for a little Team Fortress 2 to ease the stress. David Craddock was one of the people who thought Steven had a good idea, though and replied to Steven's request with "Is there any other game besides Diablo II? Yes - there's Diablo III. But that's not out yet. So I play Diablo II. Always. For long time." On the writer side of the table, both Rafe Brox and Xav de Matos expressed plans to spend some time in WoW. Of course, Rafe said he'd also be playing with power tools, and Xav expressed the intent to play the "omg, get caught up on features" game, which this blogger certainly knows all too well and will be joining him in playing. James Murff is relaxing (not having to jump on a plane) with some zombie love in Survival Crisis Z. When he's not buried in brains, he'll be hopping between Team Fortress 2 and Dwarf Fortress. And of course, most of the crew will be playing the uber-leet Sleep Deprivation game. Luckily, we've all managed to beat that game several times over and we've memorized the content. So, readers -- What aRe yoU Playing this next week? Will you play Sleep Deprivation with us and stay glued to the tubes for all the news, or will you instead kick back with your favorite game and relax?...

PC owners get another new update for Valve's popular multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 this week. This update, which as always is available when signing on via Valve's Steam client, is mostly to deal with a number of minor bug fixed in the game.While this update is a small one this week, Valve does have plans to release a more substantial patch in the near future. As we reported earlier this month the Heavy character class will be the next in the game to gain new unlockable achievements and weapons to use in the game. At the moment there's no word on when the Heavy update will be released....

The recently launched official Team Fortress 2 web site looks like it's going to be something a bit different than the normal marketing for a game title. The web site is giving folks a back door into the development process and one of the ways is showing off some unused artwork made for Valve's first person shooter.The artwork comes in the form of trading cards that Valve team members designed near the end of Team Fortress 2's development. They never went into mass production but the web site is now showing off the designs for the cards. So far four have been revealed for the Engineer, the Demoman, the Heavy and the Medic. The other character classes will get their own trading cards and they will be revealed on the site in the coming weeks....

Two down; seven more to go. Valve has added unlockable achievements and new weapons to the Medic and Pyro class in their multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2. Now the game's official web site has revealed that the Heavy class is the next to receive the same kind of treatment.Team Fortress's co-creator Robin Walker stated on the web site that they plan to reveal exactly how they plan to design such new features for the heavy in upcoming updates to the game's web site. It's a bit on the technical side but is certainly of interest to any budding game designers. There's no word yet on when the Heavy updates will be released...

Valve continues to tweak their extremely popular multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 and on Monday the developer released a new patch that may (or may not) upset fans of the Pyro class. The update, released via Steam, has two changes to the flamethrower using character . One of the issues "fixed" is "backburner's flame critical hits not being recalculated after collision. This meant that it would check if the target was looking away once and after that the flame could score a critical hit again even if the orientation change" Yet another "fix" in the update "added back some damage falloff to the Pyro's flamethrower. Not nearly as extreme as it was before the Pyro class pack." Head to the Steam web site for the full change list....

You've now hopefully finished reading our wonderful guide to pyro achievements. Will this make you a better pyro? Indubitably. You will have better weapons, better skills, and generally be a sexier pyro for all to see. Well, maybe not the last one. However, if you took our advice, you should now have three new weapons: the flare gun, axetinguisher, and backburner. If you haven't been reading our guide that we spent so much time on (tsk tsk) then we will save you the effort of digging them up. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parts are all viewable here on Big Download. Upon recieveing 10 achievements, you unlock the flare gun. After 15, it is the backburner. After 22, you recieve the axetinguisher. And then the killing can begin. We wish you all the luck in your continued journey to burn everything to the ground. If you notice any mistakes, please comment or email us!...

Glorious fire! You just love to burn things! We can't blame you, though. Nobody knows who you are, where you come from, or what your real gender even is, pyro, but we know that you sure love to set things on fire. Now that the higher ups have finally decided to give you some sweet new equipment, you must be pretty excited. But no! First you must complete some tasks, leaping through hoops before you get to purge the world in baptizing flames. Don't worry, though. We want to help you. We love your work. The pile of screaming, burning scouts? Exquisite. That's why we have crafted for you this very guide to ease your attempts to fulfill the strange objectives given to you. You have read the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth parts, so here is the sixth and final installment. Now you are ready to go and purge the world of flora, fauna, and anything else flammable....

Glorious fire! You just love to burn things! We can't blame you, though. Nobody knows who you are, where you come from, or what your real gender even is, pyro, but we know that you sure love to set things on fire. Now that the higher ups have finally decided to give you some sweet new equipment, you must be pretty excited. But no! First you must complete some tasks, leaping through hoops before you get to purge the world in baptizing flames. Don't worry, though. We want to help you. We love your work. The pile of screaming, burning scouts? Exquisite. That's why we have crafted for you this very guide to ease your attempts to fulfill the strange objectives given to you. You have read the first, second, third, and fourth parts, so here is the fifth. Soon you'll be back on the road, setting fire to all the wildlife as you pass by....

Team Fortress 2 stands out as one of the best competitive shooting games around. From its cartoon-inspired graphics to the weapon variety and class balances, TF2 is the go-to game for a high-action and a lively time. However, all the fun comes to a screeching halt when Valve releases a new class update, complete with some extremely difficult achievements that go toward unlocking special weapons. Two class updates were released so far to date, the most recent being for the Pyro class. Both releases gave rise to a flood of players rushing to unlock all the weapons and a huge number of achievement grinding servers to help expedite the task. As a result, almost all the fun is drained from Team Fortress 2 for a while following a class update. Big Download hosts a guide that helps players earn their achievements through both normal gameplay and artificially set-up circumstances, but we don't pretend to ignore some of the horror stories the mechanizations of achievement grinding brings. Does the process of earning achievements and getting new, powerful weapons ruining the long-term Team Fortress 2 experience? Are less hardcore players left out for not having the time or patience to grind for achievements? Sound-off after the jump....

Glorious fire! You just love to burn things! We can't blame you, though. Nobody knows who you are, where you come from, or what your real gender even is, pyro, but we know that you sure love to set things on fire. Now that the higher ups have finally decided to give you some sweet new equipment, you must be pretty excited. But no! First you must complete some tasks, leaping through hoops before you get to purge the world in baptizing flames. Don't worry, though. We want to help you. We love your work. The pile of screaming, burning scouts? Exquisite. That's why we have crafted for you this very guide to ease your attempts to fulfill the strange objectives given to you. You have read the first, second, and third parts, so here is the fourth. Soon you'll be back on the road, setting fire to all the wildlife as you pass by....

The above image recently surfaced over at Halolz (there's a much larger version, if you can't read the captions). It assigns classic Dungeons & Dragons ethical alignments to each of the Team Fortress 2 classes, and supports each with a quote. Some of them -- like the Demoman -- are genius, but others are a stretch. Still, plenty of people can still appreciate the geek humor!There's a problem, though; the 4th edition of D&D cuts the alignments down to a measly four! Thankfully, that didn't stop the creators of this image. We have a feeling that these oldschool alignments will forever live in the nerd zeitgeist. ...

Glorious fire! You just love to burn things! We can't blame you, though. Nobody knows who you are, where you come from, or what your real gender even is, pyro, but we know that you sure love to set things on fire. Now that the higher ups have finally decided to give you some sweet new equipment, you must be pretty excited. But no! First you must complete some tasks, leaping through hoops before you get to purge the world in baptizing flames. Don't worry, though. We want to help you. We love your work. The pile of screaming, burning scouts? Exquisite. That's why we have crafted for you this very guide to ease your attempts to fulfill the strange objectives given to you. You have read the first and second parts, so here is the third. Soon you'll be back on the road, setting fire to all the wildlife as you pass by....