Fistful of Frags 2.5, almost like a fresh start. news

Beta 2.5 won't be a simple update, the whole mod has gone through a very noticeable transformation with two main purposes: removing anything that could result annoying, especially for newcomers, and adding new features to improve Fistful of Frags as much as possible.

We try to maintain our most distinctive and enjoyable features of course, while many things that weren't resulting as good as planned, or caused slow/repetitive/unfair gameplay, have been removed. That means the changes affect pretty much everything: notoriety/equipment, player movement, weapons, levels and game modes.

There is a risk involved in so many changes, isn't very usual, but we always felt Fistful of Frags have the potential to be a much better game. So let's hope this new version gets the approval of more people than previous ones did. Here is a brief description of what you'll get pretty soon, around 2 weeks:

• Cooperative mode allowing up to 8 players: play complex missions against HL2 AI in a complete different setting, featuring new enemies and weapons!
• New game type "boss murder": each team defends a NPC boss who must be killed by enemy team to win a round. Boss placement also defines where the respawn area for each team is, so moving the boss through the map makes possible different tactics.
• Main game mode (loot capture or "fistful of dollars") is faster, less random, less captures required to win a round. Many rounds are possible because there is other limit than time per map.
• Classic deathmatch, non notoriety based: players have to find weapons placed around maps or dropped by enemies.
• Players start every round with 35-50 notes (server cvar) plus some extra notoriety depending how well they did in previous round. This is a major departure from our previous philosophy, starting with a reduced equipment selection wasn't very appealing, and some novice players had a hard time to experiment the full dimension of our mod.
• Equipment presets: select all your weapons/perks in one click. Also stack items for the whole round, they'll be added as soon as you get the necessary notoriety.
• Increased player speed, jump is less restrictive if players don't try many consecutive jumps, isn't possible to reload while jumping/sprinting anymore.
• Higher weapon differentiation: revolvers fire and reload faster, cause a bit more damage but damage drop off over distance is big enough to prevent lucky sniping as a viable tactic. Rifles are worse in close combat and better at medium/long distances, they usually kill in one shot if you aim to critical body zones, unlike revolvers.
• New damage model: multipliers have been tweaked to prevent some severe issues. Headshots are supposed to kill a player immediately, however we detected that headshots coming from revolvers were too random many times, so less damage is inflicted. Damage caused by arm or stomach hits were too low compared with chest or head, requiring 3 or more shots to kill an enemy. That's also fixed. Both situations degraded severely the fun factor and made shootouts too random at times, requiring just one shot or 4 depending your luck in that moment.
• Server option to ban any player who surpasses a kill:death ratio specified by server admin., this is meant to help newcomers play without the pressure of experienced players.
• Deathmatch bots to train your skills or just meant to populate servers easily.

And finally, some media showcasing our new Mexican bandit NPC, an awesome character made by Brad Myers. Also take a look at the Gatling gun meant to be used by the AI in co-op levels. The co-op mission is about pushing the mine cart through a level full of enemies.