Team Fortress 2 Is Being Revived?
Team Fortress 2 is receiving its first major update since 2017.
Here’s something nobody thought would happen; the legendary online first-person shooter Team Fortress 2, developed by the same company that owes the gaming community a Portal sequel, is getting its first major update in years. The 2007’s gaming title has previously received smaller updates, but its developer and publisher distanced itself from making games to making hardware and sales, leaving the title somewhat neglected. Now, the day has come for Valve to look upon its creation with grace and grant it an update to expand its lifespan.
According to Kotaku, Team Fortress 2 still plays very well, despite hailing from an age when botched gaming releases and massive delays were as common as the hair on frogs. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the title is old—because it is—and that its content is a bit stale for today’s audience. Luckily, Valve just announced that the game would receive a full-on full-sized update, bringing new items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints, and plenty of other things. A well-deserved reward for years of service provided by both the game and the players.
Team Fortress 2 aged just like any refrigerator built during the 1960s—gracefully, as it was originally made to last, not just snatch the hard-earned cash from the gaming community. Sure, the graphics are a bit dated, and some of the mechanics might use a tweaking or two, but the game has managed to maintain a consistent base of players who seemingly don’t want to quit on a gaming title. And why would they? Unlike many modern releases, Team Fortress 2 actually works as intended. To this day. After more than 15 years since it originally launched.
The game has received periodic updates regarding its summer events, which were mostly tied to mere item updates. Now, the update brings all the new goodies, including Steam Workshop content, submitted by the players themselves. You read it right; the TF2 team announced that interested players might submit their Steam Workshop content by May 1, and they’ll consider the submissions for the yet-unnamed, un-themed, summer-situated update. So, if you know your way around Steam Workshop, here’s a chance to have your content featured in Team Fortress 2.
This hasn’t been seen since 2017, when the game received its most recent massive update that brought a new official map, five community maps, new taunts, and all the other aforementioned items. This, of course, doesn’t take away from the importance of smaller updates since the developer was dealing with a botting problem—something that plagues modern titles as well—which previously made Team Fortress 2 briefly unplayable in 2022.
As stated above, Team Fortress 2 was released in 2007 following nearly a decade-long development cycle, as a sequel to the 1996 Team Fortress mod for 1996’s Quake—the latter received a remaster, while Team Fortress received a remake in 1999, called Team Fortress Classic. Team Fortress 2 was released to universal acclaim, with many praising its cartoon-styled graphics and light-hearted gameplay. Following several updates, the game introduced unlockable cosmetics in 2009 and became the first game to offer games as a service, a platform that’s prevalent to this day.
