Over the last year, the PF2 Team has worked on improving the overall feel of the grenades. Functionality-wise, the grenades have remained the same, but a few key changes have been made in our desire to make them feel better to use.

Viewmodel Animations

Every grenade has Prime, Idle, and Throw animations:

None of the animations are final.

We’ve been wanting to add grenade animations for a long time. We felt that they were essential for making the grenades feel better to use.

Projectiles

If you’ve played Pre-Fortress 2 before, you may have noticed that grenades can be a bit unpredictable in how they bounce off surfaces. In earlier versions, it was even worse, as the grenades lacked customized physics properties which made them slide and roll more often. This was especially noticeable when attempting to set up a concussion grenade jump as the grenade would bounce and roll away.

We’ve decided this was a problem that needed to be solved, as we felt that the unpredictability in how they bounced and rolled around was hampering their usability. In Team Fortress Classic and QuakeWorld Team Fortress, grenade interactions with the world are not subject to the calculations of a complex physics engine, so instead they would bounce off surfaces simply but predictably. So we’ve decided to change the grenades to interact and bounce off surfaces the same way they did in prior games.

There was some initial resistance and push back to this change among playtesters, due to how jarring it looks compared to the old physics. Despite this, the change did end up being well received in play testing.

Timer HUD

As you probably saw in the video above, there’s now a circular timer that displays around your crosshair when you prime a grenade. It’s inspired by Fortress Forever’s timer. The intent with this addition is to concisely display the detonation time and number of active grenades. We’ve tried to keep it minimal so it can be front and center on your screen.

Defusing

Some of our playtesters brought forward the idea of defusing grenades, as a way to help reduce spam. Before, there wasn’t a way to punish poorly cooked grenade throws. Initially, the idea was to have them only be defused with the use of melee weapons, similar to Team Fortress 2 Classic, another mod with a similar feature on one of its weapons, the Dynamite Pack, being defusable with the wrench. Then we decided, should it be possible to disarm a grenade by shooting it? We decided to allow you to do that as well, and it worked out well in playtests. Currently, it takes one shot to disarm frags and caltrops, and two shots to disarm special grenades. (Concussion Grenades, Nail Grenades, etc)

The Gas Grenade

This has been one of those things where strictly sticking to beta accuracy has been beneficial. If you’ve ever played Team Fortress Classic, you know the hallucination effect is underwhelming. Implementing a hallucination effect like TFC’s is possible, but it’s something we’ve ultimately decided against. If the hallucination effect were to be made convincing, it would be an extreme nuisance, but if it was left as unconvincing it would be about as useful as the gas grenade previously was. Currently, in its radius, you lose health and have “drunk vision” applied to you in increasing severity. While standing in it, you’ll also have your armor quickly melted away. The effect will eventually subside, outside of the radius.

Our hopes with this implementation is for it to be a light area denial grenade. It’s not likely to kill you, but it’s gonna start sapping away your first line of protection, making you pretty vulnerable.