Imagine a couple of punks driving down to Teufort like it's Area 51, and coming back looking sick about their own hubris, talking about watching "some guy disintegrate exactly like one of those alien movies" or how they "heard somebody laugh when he was nearly porous with bullets. There is nothing in the entire wide world more fun to me than assuming that these nightmarishly unreal men carry very real consequences wherever they go. This is, and always has been, one of my favorite recurring tropes in TF2 creative pieces. There are roughly half-a-dozen villains associated with Talon, four or five independent villainous mercenaries, and everyone else is a would-be superhero. Why is most of the core roster of the world’s premier superhero team performing some kind of terror attack in London? Why is a woman who murdered a civil rights leader trying to stop them, with the help of two avowed anti-Omnic mercenaries and three Omnics? Why did a cryogenics researcher weaponize her tech and come along for the ride? Why are a dozen envoys from tech conglomerates, grassroots movements, and paramilitary defense forces throwing down over a Gazebo in a charming Greek resort? Fuck if I know.
There are specific allegiances implied by this specific policy and interpersonal goals implied by this that aren’t really reflected in six-on-six grudge matches in a smattering of inexplicably depopulated civilian environments. Overwatch gets 80% of the way to being a superhero universe it falls short primarily because Blizzard chose not to explicitly market it as such, but it’s got everything short of the purposeful brand designation- powered heroes, super science, codenames, Faceless Hydraesque terrorist groups with shadowy, powered enforcers. There is some implementation of this broad concept that would invite a shitload of discourse that I’ve never seen materialize! In a vacuum, this is not a well-regarded Kind Of Guy around here. I can’t stress enough that the TF2 protagonists are amoral PMCs who work for callous megacorps. It’s completely amoral, but it’s also contained amorality, since the fighting doesn’t spill out of these Helleresque Designated Pointless Fight Zones- and that leaves the mercs sympathetic enough that you can play them as protagonists in stories that take place “off-the-clock” without a ton of tonal dissonance. And when the game extends to the point of having lore and worldbuilding, the idiocy becomes diegetic. This is a conflict fought on the behalf of idiots, by idiots, over idiot-goals, in spaces designed by idiots. Military instillations built mere yards from each other, with paper-thin pretenses of being civilian facilities despite the constant gun battles occurring inside. This philosophy extends into the map design the environments are farcical. Eventually they resolve this by taking the other tack, leaning into the cartoonishness, crafting character models so completely bombastic and over the top that no action taken in gameplay, no matter how absurd, will ever feel dissonant. The cartoonishness is too dissonant when you’ve got similar semi-realistic militaristic characters in much more “grounded” games. Now that the general novelty of a 3d multiplayer class shooter has eroded, development stalls out on the following aesthetic problem you can’t have semi-realistic militaristic character models rocket-jumping themselves across the map in the early 2000s.
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