hey guys sorry for the wall of text here but figured it was worth elaborating on this topic since I don't think I did as good of a job as I could have yesterday
this is not a bulletproof image but if anyone wanted more insight into why we feel the way we do about the demoknight and gunslinger not being amazing fits for gold rush it should hopefully make it a little clearer
other items like the bonk and jarate rely on cartoon logic–we think that's fine, tf2 has cartoon logic baked into it with the spy's paper masks and rocket jumping and whacking something with a wrench to make it build faster. there's a decent amount you can get away with through tf2's stylization, and while the bonk and sandvich and stuff are admittedly playing with it in a way the original designers didn't intend, they are objects that generally aren't hard to imagine existing in the established TF2 universe. a sandwich, a jar of pee, these items on their own aren't fantastical even if their gameplay function is eccentric. even a dangerous radioactive soda, while zany, at least feels like a joke about poorer regulation in the 60s: cocaine in coca cola and all that. it's not launch TF2's timbre, but it's also not too far divorced from your "0 days since last accident" decal sign and again, that cartoon logic that existed in launch.
but in the case of the gunslinger and the eyelander specifically, things are a little different. we've talked about it in the server before but the eyelander from its inception has been described as a haunted sword which collects souls and heads to make demoman stronger and faster. it's not exactly just cartoon logic, it's stepping into a more divorced genre-ambiguous take on the TF2 universe want to avoid. The halloween content drifted into the core story of TF2 fast and its tone and characters were never the same–demo is now permanently married to the paranormal, and we don't want that. we want the characters and tone of gold rush to still mostly feel like the launch game. the eyelander harshly crosses that threshold. we are still considering keeping it but locking behind the halloween toggle cvar, but we know we don't want demoknights rushing around on gravelpit as fun as the unlocks are. they don't fit the atmosphere we're trying to curate
the gunslinger is one we want to exclude that's on its surface a little more innocuous and might make us seem irreverant of classic TF2, but on exhaustive discussion we would say this too is a dramatic redefinition of engineer's archetype and has bizarre implications about the world of tf2. we see retrofuturistic sci fi technology in tf2 with stuff like the sappers and medi gun, but implying permanent body augmentation on a character is pretty heavy stuff. to give an example like the one above: we don't really want to play on ctf_convoy or whatever other classic launch-era map and be seeing mini sentries.
we mourn these items losses (or potentially partial losses for the demoknight), we know they are classic, we play with them and remember them fondly, we know their importance to the zeitgeist of the era. but the mod is called tf2 gold rush, not tf2 engineer update or tf2 war, and what we're working toward is more than just reliving a single instance of TF2 from a certain date anyway. it's more about compromising the genuine evolutions of the game from the classic updates, with the original atmosphere of the game. and there's just no dancing around it, cyborg engie and demoknight feel different in a way kritzkrieg and texas ten gallon don't
for SMG
for revolver
for syringe gun
