Team Fortress 2 News

Operation Rewired Rampage

(Image credit: washy)

After nearly a decade of fruitlessly throwing endless streams of Merc bodies at hordes of evil robots, it's about time to shake things up a bit! What could possibly be more effective than that, you ask? It's simple: become a horde of evil robots! The folks at Potato.TF aren’t entirely certain whether this is legal, safe, or even humane, but they're going to find out one way or the other. After all, science isn't about WHY, it's about WHY NOT!

Operation Rewired Rampage is a charity event created and hosted by Potato.TF. Players are now robots and must fight their way to RED’s base. Blast your way through more than a dozen community-created maps and missions this summer and experience MvM like never before! Servers are available in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Click here to get started!

In addition to destroying robots (as robots), there is a charity fundraiser supporting Direct Relief! Donate as little as $5 to receive an in-game medal! Have the link to your Steam profile ready and click here for more information.

Destroy those robots while you can! The event will end on August 26th, 2022.

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Team Fortress 2 mods return following silence from Valve

Two popular Team Fortress 2 mods are back after their creators reopened downloads, both citing Valve's lack of communication with regards to plans to bring their projects to Steam in a more official capacity. Open Fortress and TF2 Classic halted downloads in September 2021 "due to an arrangement with Valve." Their teams have both posted statements to their respective websites saying that they are intending to resume service until they hear otherwise from the FPS game's developer.

Both teams say that they closed their mods for the multiplayer game down after receiving an email from Valve asking them to suspend operations. According to both development teams, discussions were underway to bring the projects to Steam as officially-recognised mods. However both say that they've heard no contact from Valve since the initial discussions, despite attempting to contact them on multiple occasions through several different avenues of communication.

Eminoma Team, the creators of TF2 Classic, a mod aiming to recreate the feel of the game during its first year, posted a lengthy statement to the mod's website talking about the difficulties they have faced over the downtime. The team states: "On March 10, around six months after their last reply, we decided to send a final email announcing that we plan on opening our downloads back up until they re-affirm that they want us to keep them down. So our reasons for reopening are due, in short, to the lack of response from Valve."

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Team Fortress 2 protests acknowledged with first tweet in 2 years

Team Fortress 2 is often regarded as one of the best video games of all time and can be attributed to the rise of hero shooters that we've seen over the past decade. However, it's far from a perfect game and its players have been suffering a lot over the last couple of years with rampant issues with bot accounts - despite Valve's efforts to deter them. Now, after members of the Team Fortress 2 community banded together to get Valve's attention with the hashtag #savetf2, Valve has broken it's social media silence with the following message:

" TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things."

The statement above, that was posted at 00:40 GMT on May 27 is the first message posted on the official Team Fortress 2 social media account since July 18, 2020, and a retweeted Valve tweet on October 3, 2020.

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Valve responds to Team Fortress 2 fans' #SaveTF2 campaign

Good news for Team Fortress 2 fans, especially those participating in the recent #SaveTF2 campaign, a 'peaceful protest' aimed at reminding Valve that their FPS game is still loved and enjoyed by many players in spite of TF2's long standing bot woes. Valve has now officially acknowledged the problem - or, at least, felt moved enough to dig the password for the official TF2 twitter account out of a drawer and post for the first time in almost two years.

"TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things." Those are the words posted to the Team Fortress Twitter account - a small gesture of recognition, perhaps, but one that will come as very welcome to some fans who feel Valve has been too silent on the free-to-play game's recent troubles.

By far the game's most complained-about issue is bots, with a plague of aimbots affecting the game since the leak of TF2's source code in 2020. However, leading community figures also say they feel that a game that still regularly hits 75,000 concurrent players (currently sitting at number seven on the steam player charts at the time of writing) deserves regular updates that have been largely absent over the last few years.

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How Team Fortress 2's silly videos sparked a whole new era of shooters

Despite being almost 15 years old, Team Fortress 2's influence on the shooter genre continues. Specifically, it's impressive at its age that its cast is still recognisable to a younger portion of gaming fans. It's pretty wild, actually, that we all collectively know a game's characters and personalities without having needed to play the game, right? My first introduction to Team Fortress 2 wasn't through gameplay or through a friend's recommendation, it was through its animated character shorts...
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