[ansible]

Well, when TF2 came out, it was laser focused. [...] The 9 classes were designed to be recognizable from their silhouettes alone, which is pretty brilliant.

That's interesting and quite disappointing to hear. In Valve's in-game commentary, they specifically point out that they were trying hard to achieve exactly this (distinctive outlines). It sounds like there's been a complete change for the vision of the game, likely due to personnel changes.

[lelandbatey]

As someone who has played 1000+ hours of TF2, I do agree that this is dissapointing. Some items have changed silhouettes, and that can hurt gameplay.

However, TF2 was very much on the right track to have the perfect combination of revenue generating side-items with unchanging gameplay. Just because they've strayed a bit does not mean that it can't be effectively used for other games.