IGN: What influenced the changes you made to some of the classes?

Robin Walker: Let's start by talking about why do classes at all, because everything follows from that. A class should be an experience in a bottle. An engineer should be an experience, a soldier should be an experience, and those things should be different, so there's no point of having two classes where the experience of playing them is the same, or at least is negligible in terms of the difference. When we think of different experiences we're thinking about things like player decision making, when you're in some situation as a class, the ones you make as that class should be different than if you were a different class, and certainly the factors you care about should change and so on. So to us classes are about bottling up various experiences. The reason various classes changed are mostly because we were unhappy with the experience itself like in the case of the scout, where we were fundamentally unhappy with it [in the original Team Fortress Classic (TFC)], we thought it was substandard. It basically involved you not having fun in combat and having to run away from things all the time.

IGN: How far along in development are the maps right now [for the PC]? What's left to do?

Charlie Brown: The flow of the maps are pretty much the way they will be when we ship, mostly it's an art pass and there's a couple places where we're still messing with some of it... with everything we've been playtesting for three months and we're continuing to playtest and based on that feedback we kind of make changes. But at this point we feel they'd be pretty incremental especially on the stuff you'll be playing [referring to an upcoming play session with IGN]. The other thing is we've brought forward three of the classic maps at various levels. 2Fort is the one that's most faithful, it's the de_dust of the CS world, it's just the one that everyone expects so the actual layout and flow of that map is still really faithful to the original. Dust Bowl pretty much flows kind of the same, there's some different pathing and we use a new control point mechanism, which is prevalent throughout a bunch of our maps, instead of the flag mechanism, but as far as the flow it's still pretty similar. Well is pretty much Well in name alone, it's gone through a lot of change, you recognize a few of the rooms and combat spaces but in general it's pretty different. There's trains moving through the middle and again this rocket theme. There's also a new map that addresses some of the problems that have been in our space for a while, and it's one of our takes on solving that problem.