Opening The Orange Box: Team Fortress 2

What’s surprising is the sheer number of voice samples each class hason hand. Not only is the game visually striking, but the quality and quantity of the sounds, their delivery timing, and the all-pervasive funniness with which they are infused, are pleasing to the ear.

“When the character goes to speak it looks at the state of the game,” explains Walker, “what you’ve been up to and what your enemies have been up to, all sorts of stuff like that. Then it chooses a line apt for the situation. We definitely tried to make sure there were some really rare ones in there.

“We’re bringing the voice actors back for another session soon, and one of the things we want to do is to record even more of those lines, so that if people have actually exhausted the lines there’ll be a new bunch for them to discover.

“I don’t personally know how many samples there are,” confesses Walker, “but we all got together and decided that there should be some extremely hard-to-trigger lines that would hang out there for months in the hope that people would have the exact experience to make them happen. We wanted them to be playing in their third month and hear something they’d never heard before. It’s a combination of player-performance and game-state.”

We’re particularly fond of the Soldier’s battle cry of “I’m going to strangle you with your frilly training bra.” Any favourites at Valve? “I get to be in the same world as you’re in,” laughs Walker, “where I get to hear new ones and laugh at them, but I’ve always had a personal favourite in the Scout, as you baseball-bat up a load of Engineer’s buildings, you yell ‘There goes all your stupid crap, morons!’ I’ve always liked that one.”

Be sure to check back tomorrow when we crack open Portal.

Feb 28, 2008