The Sniper

The Sniper is, well, a sniper. He carries a very powerful rifle that can be used to pick off enemies from a long distance. The rifle emits a red laser dot (the same dot as the RPG in Half-Life) which is used to aim in high-power mode. The Sniper's rifle is also the only weapon in TFC that can do locational damage - leg shots do less damage than body shots, and head shots take off the most damage. The Sniper rifle also "charges" its shots, so the longer the rifle is charged the more damage it does. While the rifle is charging or fully charged (which takes 3 seconds), the sniper can only crawl along at a snail's pace. Because the Sniper's rifle is so powerful, snipers can only have 90 health and 50 yellow armor. Snipers are usually relegated to defending their team's base and picking off enemies that happen onto their line of fire.

What's new?

The new sniper rifle model looks great. It looks even better in the third person. Unfortunately the rifle takes a LOT of the screen up in the first person. When you are zoomed in, the barrel of the gun can take up a lot of space on your screen proportional to your aiming dot. What's worse is that the sniper rifle in first person view moves to indicate its charge. The higher it moves up, the more charged the weapon is. Unfortunately when you are zoomed in, this can be a huge distraction as the gun barrel takes up quite a bit of screen real estate.

The damage of the sniper rifle is lower than in TF1. It is much harder to kill people in one shot (most of the time you can't do this to heavy classes), but the reload time is the same. I think they are trying to balance the game a bit and not make it so sniper dominated. Also you can see a little ricochet where your bullet lands and hear it if you are close enough. On a map like Hunted it can be very tough on snipers because it is hard to kill the soldiers and hwguys(?)guarding the president.`

There are no flares anymore. This is probably due to the fact that you can get rid of any shadows or dark areas with a few minor console commands (console commands are not considered cheats). I personally like this because I never thought shadows were really necessary in TF. That and anyone could change their skins to be "fullbright," negating the shadow effect (this is a cheat).

Autozoom is gone. The same zoom used for the Half-Life Crossbow secondary mode replaces it. I think it is FOV 10. The good thing is that you can use your same FOV sniper scripts from TF1 in TFC. I ported over my sniper scripts rather easily (I only had to change the "impulse x" commands to the direct weapon names).

Half Life's ducking ability has been retained for TFC. This does give you some flexibility in your aiming because you lower your whole body while you aim. This also makes it harder for other snipers to hit your head since your whole body is now compacted. Unfortunately you can only crawl while you are ducking (heh obviously) but if you have your gun up and aimed, you are effectively stuck in your spot. You barely move at all, and any distance you do move is negligible.