Talk:Dustbowl 2
In an email to Dario sent by an anonymous source, Dario Casali replied with the following:
"Goldrush was released in Spring 2008, and introduced the Payload concept. It was immensely well received at the time and accounted for a large percentage of play time for four months until Badwater came out. Badwater was well received too, and play time was split quite evenly between them. Over the years the payload concept was refined. I personally think Thunder Mountain is my best attempt at Payload gameplay. It offers a variety of tactics for every class to shine and has a good mix of chokepoints, open areas, side routes and spawn timing.
Goldrush was originally conceived as a successor to Dustbowl, and you can see how similar the layout is. In fact it was completely built before I hit upon the idea of adding the payload cart, which is why some of the payload’s path can feel quite claustrophobic. At that time, chokepoints were important because of the weapons and tactics available to the classes at the time. It also introduced TF2 to a more dense availability of health and ammo resources in the field, empowering players with a level of autonomy, allowing them to stay alive longer. This enabled chokepoints to hold for longer and required teamwork to push through. Remember, back then, TF2 had a distinctly different pace to it. Control point maps played out quite slowly, and there was little push/pull of the battle between the teams, games tended to involve a skirmish, followed by a push to capture. We were still learning how a faster, more frenetically paced TF2 would play out.
Badwater Basin was originally built as a backup plan for the final stage of Goldrush, so construction began before Goldrush was released. We were experiencing some variability in outcomes with the final Goldrush stage because of the long path blue had to take to get to the final point. We experimented with advance spawn rooms (like Badwater has) but decided not to go with that, instead rely on engineers moving team mates up. That worked pretty well, but I’m still a fan of advance spawn rooms, and I think they work well on Badwater.
Thanks for your kind words about Badwater, I’m glad it has stood the test of time!
I haven’t played Bloodwater.
Hope these thoughts give you some sense of what you were asking me about.
Dario" Essentially, Dustbowl 2 became Gold Rush, which partially became Badwater. --RedFire (talk) 23:42, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
