Saxton Hale: A Parasite of Source
What is Saxton Hale?
Saxton Hale is a fan made gamemode for Valve’s class-based first person shooter Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress 2’s regular gameplay revolves around two evenly numbers teams fighting an objective such as a capture point, payload cart, or flag. Saxton Hale turns this aspect on its head by reducing blue team to a single player, and putting all other players on red team. In Saxton Hale, the blue player is given a random character with new abilities that help them even the playing field against so many opponents. This usually includes bonus health, a super jump ability, “goomba stomping”, a one hit kill melee weapon, and a rage meter that when full fears players around them leaving red players vulnerable. Saxton Hale also rebalances certain weapons such as the pyro’s airblast which costs more ammunition because of its incredible ability to keep the Saxton Hale out of melee range of their team. Saxton Hale usually has custom skins for the blue player including the character Saxton Hale himself.
Most maps in base TF2 aren’t suited to the 1 vs all format of the gamemode, so most community servers run custom community made maps built for it.
Saxton Hale as a Parasite
Saxton Hale takes a lot from Valve’s content in order to create its unique gameplay experience. For starters, the Source engine. Valve allows users to download and work with the source engine for most of their games, and without access to it, custom community server configs like Saxton Hale couldn’t be made. Saxton Hale’s gamemode is based off the arena mode, a gamemode where two times fight with no respawns with a time limit. Without this gamemode to work off of, modders couldn’t have made Saxton Hale without building a new gamemode from the ground up. Some maps (especially ones built for arena) are used on Saxton Hale servers as well. Obviously Saxton Hale uses Team Fortress 2’s team based gameplay as its foundation. Without the intricate interactions and design between all nine classes, Saxton Hale wouldn’t be the gamemode that it is today.
Valve and Modders: A Symbiotic Relationship
Schleiner discusses how modding is parasitic in that the parasites take from their host, but Saxton Hale and most community content made for valve games tends to be more symbiotic in nature. Valve recognizes the benefits of community content, which is why they create tools to support it. Most important of which is the steam workshop, a place where players can upload custom content for games that can be easily downloaded directly onto users systems. This allows players to find and share content with one another without concern over dangerous software. Valve also releases plenty of their development tools for free including Source SDK, the Hammer level editor, and the Steam API; all of which is necessary for content like Saxton Hale to be created.
Valve on the other hand receives free content for their games, free community engagement, and potentially indefinite live service without having to lay a finger on their games. TF2 was released in 2007 and nearly hit a new player peak this past holiday, and its success can be widely attributed to Valve’s consistent support of community content.