Wow, what a weekend! Some of you may know that a large part of the TO:Crossfire Team (8 people to be exact) was attending one of the oldest and most familiar TacticalOps LAN-Parties in Germany, the Lanplugged 7 - organzied by the Wildcards Online. We knew this was going to be a very special one because we brought TO:Crossfire with us - but we didn't expect the result we got.
On friday morning we met at the location and started building up 3 workstations for the public to play TO:Crossfire on - all were invited to have a go! The first gamers were quite shy, cautiously trying to get a feel for the game they had been waiting to play for so long. It was very interesting for us to see how the community is trying to get into Crossfire. Would they have to play 2 maps before they get a feeling for it? How soon can they adept the gameplay? And most importantly: do they like it? To answer the latter straight away: they loved it.
With 8 TO:Crossfire Team members and 3 workstations the server was full almost all the time and our team was having as much fun losing fights as the public was having winning them - but more on this later on. To make sure everybody gets an impression of TO:Crossfire we were able to use the huge beamer to broadcast hot infights and great sniping duels to the whole audience - it didn't take long and the first heads turned around, people were ordering a pizza and watching the first showmatch, TO:C Developers vs. Mixed Fan-Dreamteam. (We got beaten by them quite badly.)
Overall, we showed off 5 maps - including Province (one of the publics' favourite), Anvil, Avion, CaspianSea and LegoLand - a small funmap that was made by a bored mapper - and the complete weapon selection including all weapons that the first public beta will include.
We have promised to concentrate on both friendly public gameplay and clanwars in our development of TO:Crossfire - so on saturday evening it was time to show off the clanwar side of the game. This was our second showmatch, this time a short 5 on 5 in Province was scheduled against (v) (Mortis Veles). We ended up getting our asses whooped, so (v) demanded to play another map! What followed was more (v) ownage on Anvil! While playing and having fun, most of the time we were talking to the audience, asking for feedback, answering questions and running around. In fact, the amount of positive feedback (ranging from "It's amazing!" to "Feels like back in the good old days") was suprisingly high - and the criticism was what we expected.
For all of those who were not able to make it to the LAN, we took some shaky-cam footage of the showmatch against (v) - and hopefully by end of the week another goodie will be available for you - so keep your eyes open, there is more to come!
That sounds like a fantastic experience, to see how people react to something you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into. I wish I was able to attend, but alas, I live across the ocean. Can't wait for the public beta. :)