Everyone who pre-ordered The Orange Box this past week got their hands on the Team Fortress 2 beta — the reception has been universally positive. But much like every beta in existence, there are some technical problems and this Steam Forums post is blooming with cries for help.
The problems seem to range from random lock-ups, to continual audio looping, to random in-game stuttering, to the game not even starting up at all. While all of these problems seem either generic or have plagued Source-engine games for years, a good number of people are pretty miffed about it.
Also the problems seem to affect a huge range of PCs too, from the rather mediocre PCs to the top-of-the-line PCs.
For one, the looping audio problem and in-game stuttering has been affecting Source games for years. A solution to alleviate these problems, especially for older PCs, was to simply lower your in-game graphical settings so your PC doesn’t explode when trying to run the game. While I’m still surprised that people don’t understand this simple concept, it helps.
One user named nutcrackr said, "I seem to have stopped the crashing. I used "-fullscreen -width 1280 -height 1024 -refresh 60 -dev" startup. Then I turned of AA, HDR, AF, Motion Blur. Ran fine for over an hour, many rounds, classes, large player counts. Obviously without AA, AF and these other settings its not ideal but its better than crashing."
In the end, the beta has been running for only two days and I’m sure Valve is going crazy trying to handle all the problems with the game. Also considering that the problem is affecting many people with many different PCs, it’s going to be a little while to formulate all the fixes.
On the bright side of things, I’ve been enjoying the beta immensely and haven’t experienced any problems yet; literally, zero problems. All my settings are on high; HDR, AA and AF are all on or set to high and the game runs like a dream with 24 people running around.
