TF2's Spawn Rooms

I haven’t brought it up in a while, but I have a Discord server! I use it to chat with ya’ll and set up events, so hop in: discord.gg/4UMFUcYFeM

I am now cursed with the knowledge that the badwater benches levitate

Valve, please give us an update, PEOPLE ARE STARTING TO TALK ABOUT THE F*ING SPAWN ROOMS.

The Mountain Lab spawn also has a nice bit of environmental storytelling included, with the airboat apparently being the means by which the BLU team arrived.

you didn't have to make the thumbnail go so damn hard

The basement spawn rooms in 2fort with no spawn points 💀

The spawn room is where I spend the most of my time in tf2, besides the respawn counter.

Spawn rooms are my favorite places in a map aesthetically. Especially Mossrock's Blu spawn takes the cake. (Monster Bash is a close second)

I think the bland spawnrooms is an intentional choice to push players out into the battlefield. Most of the nice looking spawns are the ones that you have to wait in during setup.

Really glossed over the fact Blu first spawns are so detailed are because Blu spends over a minute in them in setup.

I like a lot of the non immersive spawnrooms because you basically are walking out of a small building or functionally a closet, anything that isn't a small generic functional box or really small like the 5cp one ways, but something like the chinese koth map is a great storage room.

10:22 Looks like he's in the barrel today.

I knew that this benches had something wrong with them. Good to finally know what exactly.

0:08 you could also pick a good map and talk about it for 12 hours

9:17 Bloodwater version has that door... and it was very brilliant idea, also everyone would go to that way too.

2:51 🪨

You forgot to mention it feels eternity in there and it's longer than you think.

It is a vague memory, but one of the past favourite spawn rooms had to be from a lost and forgotten custom map call "Koth_basement_v4" Was made by a L4D2 mapper. The Tf2 maps they made were always very... unique. Basement was one of the most claustrophobic in a serious way maps I've ever seen. They also worked on a 5cp map that was 5 different skyscrapers and a territory control map where the red spawn was a lighthouse directly in the middle. I was their only playtester at the time, but I vividly remember these maps and how you could tell a l4d2 mapper made them, they felt so damn weird. But the l4d2 philosophy of "making saferoom interesting and fun to exist in for long periods of time carried over to the spawn rooms. I really wish I could tell you where to find them, but it is all lost media. The download link is gone, but you can still find vids of the skyscrapers and the basement.

The 5cp spawn rooms only unlock when you control the middle and forward point. They're nerfed precisely to avoid the home field advantage that the defending team gets. It's inconsistent. Also by making the rooms exit-only they can avoid complicated door logic since the door just needs to open when someone's inside. The hypothetical entrance clip doesn't have to be toggled on and off based on which point is active (which could potentially get the door stuck open), or risk someone being able to enter a spawn point behind the points that are being contested.

Forward spawns are empty for a reason. They're meant to be light on visuals so that the only thing in your immediate vision is the spawn door. The final spawn rooms on 5cp maps are often just a bare room and don't allow you back inside in order to subconsciously keep gameplay flowing. This is the same reason why maps are more detailed in the playable space but nearly everything out of bounds is empty fields. It can actually hurt readability to have too much detail in spaces, and the source engine has a strict brush and faces limit, so sometimes mappers have to keep less important areas sparse for that reason.