Team Fortress 2 Classic News

[p]Happy Halloween! Last month, we had intended to show off our progress by letting people play TF2C in the Open Beta. Obviously, that plan hit a bit of a snag, but after a few "calm and collected conversations," we're back to business. This time, we have the last two months of progress to cover instead of the usual one. Here is the current state of the game.[/p]
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[h2]State of the Game[/h2]
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[p]Currently, every gamemode is in the port and working. Almost every TF2C exclusive map has been ported, with the remaining 3 simply pending a recompile. Every weapon is implemented, fully functional, and presentable, with the exception of one animation bug with the twin barrel. Four-Team, with its new dynamic teams system for mappers, is implemented. Lighting changes are fully in effect, and all planned achievements have been ported. When we gave a similar run down back in May, this content was simply "functional", but often had serious bugs, missing visuals, or other faults that would make them not launchable. Now, this content is all borderline complete. We're not done yet, however.[/p]
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[h2]What's Left?[/h2]
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[h3]User Interface[/h3]
[p]Volunteer projects like this are very prone to what we call "bottlenecking", where a sizable portion of work is required but only a few people have the skills needed to complete that work (applications are always open, by the way). In our case, this is the user interface. We are working towards a much needed revamp of our main menu and server browser interfaces. While they aren't yet presentable, our goal is to improve the flow of starting a server and finding community servers.[/p]
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[h3]The "Bug Whack-a-Mole"[/h3]
[p]The fun thing about doing a massive bug sweep on the game is that it makes smaller bugs more noticeable. "Bug Whack-a-Mole" is what I have affectionately called the process of knocking out a series of small or annoying bugs, attending that weekend's playtest, and leaving with a new list of bugs just as long as the first. The good news is that very few of them are serious gameplay issues anymore. The bad news is that a small bug does not equate to a quick fix. So, some of our developers will be buffing these out until launch.[/p]
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[h3]Odds and Ends[/h3]
[p]There are a few other miscellaneous tasks left, such as colorblind mode, some tweaks for custom weapons, the chicken, and achievement feedback. Oh, there's also the ███████, but I'll have more to say on that later. For now, we'll move on to the more exciting stuff.[/p]
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[h2]Rebalances[/h2]
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[p]The game is finally at a point where we can test balance changes without the data being completely unusable. We've already mentioned in the past that the Huntsman and AA Cannon have new hitreg systems, but a few other items have also been reworked since.[/p]
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[h3]Rejuvenator[/h3]
[p]The Rejuvenator was the last holdout for ported weapons by a large margin, only getting in towards the end of September. The reason? This weapon was pretty overengineered. In the old version of the game, the Rejuvenator had a whopping five separate factors that could wildly sway how much healing it does. Not only was this a nightmare to try and port, it was also unclear to players and messy to balance.

So we're reworking the healing calculation. In the Steam version, the Rejuvenator will focus a lot more on landing direct hits, and its healing will be a lot more consistent when landing direct or indirect hits.[/p]
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[h3]Mine Layer[/h3]
[p]Back in May, for our final balance patch, I heavily tweaked the Mine Layer with the promise to do a deeper rework later due to pacing issues. A large number of mines can be tedious to remove and they often slow down the game, especially if used by multiple Demomen. Now, that rework is finally in development.

Our current plan is to ensure that mines are interesting to fight by expanding the options for counterplay, and we're pretty close to succeeding. Once we have mines that are actually fun to engage with, we'll tweak the stats accordingly.[/p]
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[h2]Map Facelifts[/h2]
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[h3]Trainyard[/h3]
[p]VIP Trainyard tends to get repetitive after a full session, as many maps with short round timers often do. To give the BLU team more of a fighting chance, and to lower the amount of time spent in the setup phase, we have introduced a lives system for permadeath VIP. Now, when the Civilian walks into a sticky trap that you totally called out in comms, he will still have two more chances before the round is over. To complement this gamemode change, we've also updated the map's visuals to introduce more detail and bring it in-line with our current visual standards.

Here's images of the new version, with the old version to compare:[/p]
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[h3]Flask[/h3]
[p]With the introduction of custom team combinations, we wanted to further refine the aesthetics of the YLW and GRN teams. To achieve this, Flask has gotten a complete facelift. For long-time blog readers, we teased this in a post on our website a while back. Each corner of the map will now lean further into its team's aesthetic, while still retaining the layout and feel of the original map.

Oh, and here's another comparison for you:[/p]
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[h2]Regarding the ███████[/h2]
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[p]When we announced the ███████ last month, we were under the impression we could sort it out in due time. Unfortunately, communication barriers have made it unclear as to what █████ we can ██████. We have received contradictory claims as to our limits, and we will not commit resources to a decision until we are absolutely sure it is the best option. As such the █████ ████████ is still pending. We thank you for your patience on this matter, but the situation will remain classified until further notice.

~ Nito & the EMINOMA Team[/p]

[p]Hello everyone.

Unfortunately, we will not be hosting an Open Beta, due to reasons outside of our control. We've dealt with things like this before, but we’re sorry that this had to happen so soon after the announcement. In this post, we'll talk about what happened, and what's next.[/p]
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[h2]Technical Limitations[/h2]
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[p]In the final stages of the review process, we were informed that an app on Steam cannot be both a Mod and a Demo at the same time. Unfortunately, this was not caught by anyone at EMINOMA or at Valve until last Saturday, after initial reviews hadn't flagged it as an issue and gave us the mistaken belief that we were clear to ship.[/p]
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[h2]Silver Lining[/h2]
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[p]The good news is that this time crunch poured jet fuel on development, and the mod is in pretty good shape. We're still very much on track for full release, and are probably in a better spot than we would have been if we never attempted this in the first place.

There's a lot that's still in the works, and we hope you're as enthusiastic as us about it. You'll be hearing more from us sooner than you think.[/p]
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[h2]In Other News...[/h2]
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[p]Valve has asked us to ███████, due to concerns that the ████ ████ ████████ █ ███████ is too ███████ ██ ████ ████████ ███████. We're inclined to agree.

This sparked internal conversations, and encouraged us to start thinking ██████ █████ ███ █████ ███████, aiming to tie it into our ████████ ███ ███ ██████. We aren't flipping the script on ████ ███ ████ █████, but we want this to be a ███ ███, and we want our ████████ to ██████████ █████████ what we've been █████ and what's █████ █████.

There's a lot we're excited for, and we're going to channel that energy into our ████████████ so it's clear to ███ ███████ what █████ █████.

~ The EMINOMA Team[/p]

[p]Yes, you read that title right! Team Fortress 2 Classic will have a demo available to play during Steam Next Fest: October 2025! This open beta will run from October 13 to October 27th (that's two weeks). We're not sure if mods are normally at Next Fest, but the opportunity presented itself and we took it! We have been working overtime for the past month to get ready for this, and I could not be more proud of the devs who have been toughing it out.[/p]
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[h2]How do I join?[/h2]
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[p]When Next Fest begins, you will be able to download the Team Fortress 2 Classic Open Beta from our store page. You will need to have TF2 installed beforehand, otherwise the mod will throw an error when you start it. Once that's done, you will be good to go! For our existing players, you do not need to touch Source SDK 2013 Multiplayer,[/p]
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[h2]What can I expect?[/h2]
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[p]Every TF2C-exclusive weapon, gamemode, and map* will be returning, available for you to play with during the open beta! A handful of new additions we've made including damage feedback, balance changes, revamped Four-Team support, and more will also be available for testing. Additionally, we have a few extra surprises waiting for you.

Features that won't be showing up just yet are ones mostly unrelated to the core gameplay experience. Achievements and custom weapon support won't be available during the open beta, but are still slated for launch. We're also eyeing further work to the main menu and weapon balancing.

In addition to officially hosted servers, a number of community servers will also be hosting during the event. We've been working with them over the last month to iron out any crashes or technical issues.

*Casbah will not be returning in its current form. We apologize for not removing it sooner.[/p]
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[h2]What's next?[/h2]
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[p]The open beta is the biggest milestone we've hit so far, and I suspect that many of our developers will want to rest for a little bit (and play alongside you all). Beyond that, there is still more work to be done: on top of the aforementioned work-in-progress features, we also want to evaluate feedback received for the open beta. Often with feedback, we've run into the issue of only getting word from players who already are familiar with TF2 Classic.

The open beta is a great chance to cut through any sampling biases and get a good look at what newcomers think. If you love what you play of the open beta, please let us know! If you don't, please let us know even more![/p]
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[h2]Sounds great, what else?[/h2]
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[p]Keen-eyed observers may have noticed that we now take donations. Currently, all of our infrastructure costs are covered out-of-pocket by our team of volunteers.

These costs include hosting various internal servers and other services vital to development. If you would like to help keep development afloat, please consider donating to our Ko-fi!

For those who donate monthly, you will receive access to a special TF2 Classic Discord role that will give you access to a plethora of behind-the-scenes goodies.[/p]
[p]Donate[/p]
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[p]We thank all of you for the support you've given us over the years, and it fills me with pride to see this finally coming to fruition.

See you in October,

~ Nito[/p]