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Exploring Valve Archive, part 29 - the Mercs we almost got valvearchive.com>archive>archive>Team Fortress>Team Fortress 2>Art>Character Art>Sniper/Scout/Pyro/Medic>Concepts Valve's design process for the TF2 mercenaries was a balancing act on many fronts. They needed to be distinct and identifiable at a glance without being loud or too complex; they needed designs that communicated function without sacrificing form; and they needed to be iconic without hogging the character spotlight. To find the perfect balance of character design, Valve did what they did best: they iterated, iterated, and iterated some more, keeping the ideas that worked while scrapping or re-purposing those that didn't. This fine-tuning left a lot of interesting proto-mercs on the cutting room floor that often get overlooked in the TF2 beta community: a Pyro with a distinct face, a Medic with no handsome features in the slightest, a Scout who looks straight out of high school, and a Sniper very reminiscent of Crocodile Dundee. It's interesting to see how the Mercs could've looked like, but it's good to know that the line-up we have today was meticulously crafted to be as timeless and iconic as they were when the game first released 16 years ago.