Team Fortress 2 Medic achievements revealed, will spoil the game

As we’ve mentioned before, Valve is planning an update to Team Fortress 2 which will add an extra dimension to the Medic class along with a good reason to polish of medic gun skills and get back into healing for a living. Unlocking 36 achievements will earn you three new weapons which we outlined yesterday – now we also have the full rundown on the individual achievements themselves and, to be honest, I have my doubts.

Firstly let me clarify that Medic is my class of choice and so when this news came along, the first thing I thought was score! – it seemed directly tailored for my play style. But now that I’ve seen the actually achievements themselves, fears that this will basically spoil the game are seriously beginning to mount.

I won’t list the whole lot here because it would just go on forever – Destructoid has the whole shebang and with a very tidy little set of individual icons that frankly would take me an hour and half to replicate here, so go look at theirs for the full run down. Before you go though here’s a few examples.

Roughly a third are pretty easy – the kind of thing you’d expect like:

Preventive Medicine: Block the enemy from capturing a control point with an Uber-Charged teammate.

Or the ones that’ll build up over time like:

Grand Rounds: Heal 200 teammates after they've called for "Medic!"

And one’s where you’ll have a bit of fun:

Hypocritical Oath: Kill an enemy Spy that you have been healing.

Then we ease into the more tricky selection, including:

Autoclave: Assist in burning 8 enemies with a single Uber-Charge on a Pyro.

Or

Ubi concordia, ibi victoria: Assist in killing 5 enemies on an enemy control point, in a single life.

And others of a similar nature – they’ll require a fair bit of skill mixed in with some good timing and luck of course – but then this would be no fun without some challenge.

Then we move into the really challenging ones:

Big Pharma: Assist a Heavy in killing 30 enemies, where neither of you die.

and

Doctor Assisted Homicide: Assist in killing 20 nemeses.

Again, not exactly impossible. Of course they’re some are going to be made a whole lot harder by the fact that when the update comes, every player and his dog is going to suddenly switch to Medic class, but who knows, maybe that’ll make of the medic-on-medic or medic-versus-medic challenges easier. Regardless though, it is only going to make playing the game and the Medic himself less enjoyable for the time it takes people to get over the novelty.

However, the ones I really object to are the achievements where you actually have to alter your gameplay in a way that might actually cause a detriment to your whole team. As a medic, I consider my role to be fundamental to the overall tactics of the team. A well timed ubercharge can and regularly does change the whole outcome of the game. Who you give it to and why is important and if there are people only out to score an achievement point or two, it’s going to spoil it all for those who just want to have a normal game.

Prime examples of these are:

Blunt Trauma: Assist in punching out 4 enemies with a single Uber-Charge on a Heavy.

And

First Do No Harm: Play a full round without killing any enemies, and score the highest on a team of 6 or more players.

And if Valve decides to do this for every class, which would only be fair, we’ll have to face this same thing each and every time.

In the end though, I think a lot of people are simply going to get these by setting up custom games for the sole purpose of earning them, and basically that defeats the entire point of having the Achievements in the first place.

It’s good to have an update and incentive to get back in TF2, but it looks like Valve may have broken the game in the process.