tc_hydro appreciation post

I haven’t played Team Fortress 2 in years and years, but I think of the map tc_hydro pretty often, at once launch-TF2’s least popular map (apparently) and, I reckon, its finest hour aesthetically. So much effort and enthusiasm went into every corner of this map, often in ways that on the Source engine were pains in the ass. It’s got non-linearly curved, arched corridors lined with pipes (fuck that), intricate displacement caves, and multiple large discrete map sections which aren’t simultaneously accessible (because of the game mode) but which have observable connections.

There’s so much to look at via leisurely noclip. Care has been taken over inaccessible rooms coming off of what would otherwise be featureless hallways, and the desert/Spytech theme feels super cohesive, where in later maps the Red Barn Blue Shed thing feels a bit phoned-in. TF2’s style lets you fluke a nice looking map without too much effort, but Hydro really puts its back into it. This was also pre-MannCo, pre-Jarate, pre-elaborate-TF2-lore, so the vibe was different with the Spytech stuff – it all feels a bit Benny Hill to me now.

Not a lot of Valve maps do so well at avoiding the “griddy” feeling you tend to get from games on this engine, where every prominent non-90-degree angle was a potential performance liability. My favourite part of the map is the guard rail in the image above – this crazy little road bends 180 degrees around, up and down a hill, so that standing in the middle and looking around at it feels like a flattened 360 panorama. And Source doesn’t have any kind of spline mesh tools, so you know someone exported an AutoCAD .DXF of the road out from Hammer and modelled this special-case guard rail (and the curved fence behind it) just to do this cool weird thing that was probably in some concept art. It recalls a time when the people working on TF2 cared about it more, or at least differently, than seemed to be the case post-launch. TF2’s a messy, weird game now, but at this time it seemed immaculate.

Hydro was also the only official map ever made for the Territory Control game mode, which was apparently wildly unpopular as Valve never made a map for it again, so sadly, nobody plays Hydro anymore. I often wish games would display credits on a per-map or per-asset basis, so I could email the folks responsible for this map in particular and say, hey, nice work.