Here’s a video from notorious Valve snooper Tyler McVicker, where he pores over the 20 unreleased maps. A lot of them are just small tweaks of maps that did see the light of day, but there are some bigger treats like Nightfall, a five capture point map that would have taken place at night. The mirrored version of Degroot’s Keep with two castles reminds of how wild a melee-only mode felt at the time, and just how much fun I had using it as an arena to practice trick stabs.
There’s some good lore in there, too, giving context to this first look at the original version of Dustbowl 2. It’s neat seeing McVicker get excited about a peek at the “early early” days of the game, when capture the flag mode worked like TF2 classic and you had to take a briefcase to the enemy’s base. Apparently there was also a mode called VIP where one team had to protect a weakened player, which turned into Payload.
There’s loads more! An early version of Hightower had teams racing to fuel rockets by capturing three flags, while on another map you needed to nab a key to unlock a jail cell, for some reason. There also five fully art-passed tutorial maps designed for the Soldier, and an early prototype of a map set on a zeppelin that the blue team would have had to crash.
McVicker says he’ll keep digging into the rest of the leak. In the meantime, here are some even more prototype-y assets from Twitterer Richter Overtime.
I’m sad they never included that souped-up Engineer turret, later down in the thread. It might have meant even more Engineer players for me to stab.
