this this article caught my eye today.
"It's a large scale modification to the core of the game," Walker hinted. "It'll debut in a limited fashion through the Medic first

I wonder if this will be the return of grenades in the form concussion grenades for medic.

On the same topic as the last post.. This was one of those games where even getting into each others base is very difficult since they are all on defence.
Click for bigger pic.

This eng had his SG in a perfect place. He constantly (and I mean constantly) repaired his SG from the dispenser next to him. You couldn't kill it with a barrage of rockets or fully charged sniper shots. I watched demomen try to kill it with no luck - by the time they could get in range they were shot to shreds. One tried lobbing bombs up from the water but he either couldn't see where he was firing and so missed or when he moved into a better position he got wasted by the SG since it could cover the water too.

He was backed up by a couple of very good snipers and for a while (as in the screenshot) there was a soldier spamming rockets and periodically restocking from the dispenser. Leaving your own base was almost impossible, I could understand why most chose the easier option of staying in their own base "defending". You could eventually get to it as a spy but there was a strategically placed SG at the top of the ramps in the ramp room that you couldn't walk past and had an eng guarding it. If only my spy had grenades, no other class seemed to be able to make it far enough to help.

I like TF2, lets get that out of the way first. Nothing is perfect though and here are my thoughts.

I was a serious TFC player and have to say that sadly the communication in TF2 is worse. Why? Well first of all when you are dead nobody alive can see your text. This means the end of one of the few times you can actually get some teamwork going, no more "enemy coming in through water entrance" and other messages that are useful to your team and mean that although you got killed you can still be of use to your team.

To add insult to injury there is now the damned 20 second spawn time which would be a perfect time to talk to your teammates rather than stopping in your respawn or in the middle of a map - you just know you are going to get killed half way through typing if you need to type something more complicated than one of the canned messages.

I suppose they disallowed it because you can spectate, and you can spectate because of their CS style respawn delay :-/ It actually made more sense in CS as you would be dead for longer so there were usually people to actually talk to. In TF2 there is usually only one or 2 other people dead and there's little chance of actually having a conversation.

Next up - Grenades! Many excuse the removal of grenades as "to stop spamming" which is clearly rubbish if you have ever been at the other end of a soldier spamming rockets or a demoman spamming bombs along with a HWguy you know that spam is alive and well in TF2. This claim also ignores the range and richness of grenades in TFC - forget frag grenades, what about concs, hallucination grenades, EMP grenades, the Pyros flaming grenades? All these had very valid uses and greatly increased the range of tactics you could use as they had their strengths in particular situations. EMPs were great against HWguys, the pyros firebombs were a great area denial tool against snipers on 2fort. In TF2 when you have goood snipers who have set up their home on the battlements there isn't much you can do - previously there were a whole range of ways of getting to the enemy battlements whatever class you were playing. In TF2 you will end up with almost no health left and die 1 second after reaching the battlement - if you ever get there at all since the snipers have a clear shot at you as you make your way to their base.

There is one exception that makes it clear that grenades were removed for a reason other than "spamming" (and did people really spam conc grenades?. The scout could previously use conc grenades to get to the enemy battlements - either using 2 to jump the whole distance from one side to the other or concing from the ground or water. You could say that they took concs out to stop scouts concing to the other side but they obviously they want scouts to be able to get from battlement to battlement because in TF2 2fort there never used to be the roof over the bridge. They added it because they had to take out concs (for some other reason) and they had to produce some other way to let the scout get to the battlements. If they didn't have to take all grenades out of the game they would have left scouts with concs - after all they clearly want scouts to be able to do what concs used to give them. In pre release footage of TF2 you can see that there is no roof over the bridge and that Demomen have MIRVS (yet another omission from TF2).

I think they had bug(s) with grenades and due to time restrictions they took them out rather than fix them. The only other explanation is that they wanted to make TF2 less rich and more dumbed down - surely they wouldn't do that... would they?

So first TF2 and now the UT3 Demo is out. Nothing good for ages and now too many to play at once. And I never did find time for ETQW even though I liked it a lot.