Team Fortress 2
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| Team Fortress 2 | ||||||||||||||||||
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 "We make good team!"
— Heavy Weapons Guy | ||||||||||||||||||
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Team Fortress 2 (abbreviated as TF2) is a team-based first-person shooter video game developed and published by Valve. It features multiplayer gameplay, allowing the player to choose between nine playable classes: Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper, and Spy.
It is the sequel to the 1996 Quake mod, Team Fortress, and its 1999 remake, Team Fortress Classic. It was released as part of the video game compilation, The Orange Box on October 10, 2007, for Windows and the Xbox 360. A PlayStation 3 version followed on December 11, 2007. On April 8, 2008, it was released as a standalone title for Windows. The game was updated to support macOS on June 10, 2010, and Linux on February 14, 2013.
It is distributed online through Valve's digital distribution service, Steam. Retail distribution was handled by Electronic Arts.
Why It's Worth the Wait
- Team Fortress 2 is filled to the brim with over-the-top one-liners from each of the nine playable characters (as well as other side characters such as Merasmus and the Mann Brothers).
- Despite coming out in 2007, it is still a beautiful game, largely due to its intelligent application of stylized, cartoonish graphics.
- Since 2011, Team Fortress 2 has been a completely free-to-play game, and harbors one of the best free-to-play models in gaming to this day.
- The Meet the Team videos are some of the best videogame trailers ever.
- As a sequel to Team Fortress Classic, it is a massive improvement in gameplay despite the radical changes. These changes were done for the sake of simplification and balance for newcomers and emphasizing the teamwork aspect which includes: the removal of grenades and armor, toned down player physics to be less breakneck, and nerfing/buffing certain classes.
- Each class has its own set of strengths/weaknesses, and is well-known for their distinct personalities and simplistic designs, making them identifiable by their silhouettes alone. Team Fortress 2's classes are brilliantly designed with their game style and are fun to play with examples include the Soldier a tough class able to use his powerful rockets to fight multiple threats himself and also can use their explosions to launch himself, the Spy a unique class that can turn invisible and disguise as other players and can stab players from behind for an instant kill, Medic not only granting extra health to his patients but invincibility, and the Engineer excelling at defense and team support with his Dispenser and Sentry Gun.
- Hilarious and well-done voice acting, especially from Gary Schwartz as Demoman and even Heavy Weapons Guy.
- There are thousands of customization options in Team Fortress 2; players can customize their characters with a variety of hats, taunts, weapon reskins, and other cosmetic options. These can either be bought for real money in the Mann Co. Store/Steam Community Market, found through random drops (premium accounts only), or traded for. In regards to trading, the game has an intricate and complex trade economy entirely run and policed by the community.
- Each class has countless different weapons to use, allowing for a wide selection of unique playstyles/subclasses that introduce an even greater sense of variety to the already unique nine classes.
- TF2 has a refined weapon design that makes the arsenal all stand out. Unlike many FPS games with a plethora of weapons with identical stats with subtle differences adhering to realism, this game's arsenal has succinct advantages with crazy perks that aren't about the weapon itself, but rather affect the wielders! For example: Fists of Steel grants a Heavy defensive bonus against ranged weaponry while conversely suffering twice from melee attacks or the Rescue Ranger sacrifices the offensive power of the Engineer's shotgun in favor of long-distance building repair or relocation from afar.
- Loyal and talented members of the community are free to submit their creations to the Steam Workshop in hopes of getting their work added to the game. Very few games encourage this level of community involvement, and countless fan-favorite hats, weapons, and taunts have their origin there.
- Items can be found in a variety of qualities, each with their gimmick and color (more than one item quality can be found on the same item; for example, many Decorated weapons are also Strange or, more rarely, Unusual). These special items do not affect gameplay, but they do add a greater sense of scale to the collecting/trading side of TF2.
- Despite offering microtransactions, Team Fortress 2 is not pay-to-win whatsoever. Players can choose to spend money if they want access to more cosmetics/customization options, but every weapon is easily obtainable without spending a dime. Even a premium account, the main incentive for spending money, is only marginally different from a new player's account (aside from the negative stigma that a new player's account carries).
- Plenty of fun and fast-paced game modes to choose from, from pushing a bomb cart in Payload mode, King of the Hill, fighting waves of robots in Mann vs Machine, or with the latest mode having a team face off against a powerful (player controlled) boss in VS Saxton Hale mode!
- If that's not all, the game supports community servers and is easy to connect to and these servers offer a lot more variety in their customized modes! Play from karting races, 100x weapon stats, class wars, or prop hunts!
Bad Qualities
- The game's optimization has declined significantly in the wake of recent updates (possibly after the SteamPipe/Source 2013 update). System requirements are outdated (e. g. Pentium 4 CPU), and the game no longer runs well on lower-end or mid-end systems, even after lowering graphical settings.
- The competitive matchmaking is severely flawed. In addition to long wait times, the mode lacks player incentive, rank decay, competitive seasons, and a good map pool. The entire Meet Your Match update that was introduced for the Competitive Mode in 2016 was viewed as a complete kneejerk reaction on Valve's part when it looked like Overwatch was going to cannibalize TF2's player base.
- The sad thing is that nowadays when you are in a Casual server, chances are that the option to switch to a different team (BLU or RED Team) is now completely gone. Now, auto-balancing has taken its part and most of the time, it is not fun. When you're on a winning team, the auto-balancing can sometimes change you to the losing team, which can make the game experience feel unfair.
- It did not use to be like this, before 2016, the game used to have a quickplay that was a faster way to play matches that never ended. The new matchmaking system has been negatively received for removing the simplicity and interrupting how slow it felt to start and end matches.
- As the game's casual experience differs so greatly from serious gameplay, the transition to the competitive scene is difficult. Aside from its largely unused competitive matchmaking system, Valve does nothing to ease the process.
- Like all games, TF2 suffers from some balance issues. Some weapons are too strong, some are useless, and a few classes aren't quite as viable as others.
- Similarly, map design has been looked upon as flawed with the older maps being inferior to the newer ones due to the old ones having many chokepoints and tight corridors or limited paths relying on heavy coordination and specific classes to break defenses or benefiting a class too much (spots that let Engineers or Snipers lock down a point too aggressively). These maps include Dustbowl, 2Fort, Turbine, or Junction.
- Team Fortress 2 struggles to properly teach new players how to play the game. The game harbors inaccurate and useless tips that are not easily accessible, as well as an incomplete tutorial that is riddled with inaccuracies and bad advice. The game does nothing to teach new players about competitive play, and many of the more advanced techniques are left completely unmentioned, requiring the use of third-party sites to become a well-versed player.
- As of late, Valve has been providing less support, responsibility, or any care for the game. Since late 2017 after the Jungle Inferno update, major game updates have been smaller and less frequent, with the only consistent major updates being the Scream Fortress Halloween events that add new maps (which tend to have intentionally-unbalanced mechanics that make them fan-favorites), cosmetics, warpaints, and missions that allow players to obtain Halloween cosmetics.
- Ever since late 2019, the game has seen a large influx of bots/cheaters, the majority of which are never banned. The most common types of bots are usually the Sniper aimbots that headshot within seconds of sight while spamming malicious links, mocking messages, telling other players to uninstall the game and/or play Overwatch (which spawned conspiracy theories that the bot hosters were hired by Activision Blizzard to boost Overwatch 2's player count by making Team Fortress 2 unplayable) or inappropriate voice messages, typically hate speech, loud noises, or . The worst of these came in the form of lagbots in April 2020, which were bots that could overload a server with so much ping, that the game would crash (though fortunately, their reign only lasted two weeks before Valve patched the server exploit allowing lagbots to do their work). Years later, it has gotten to a point where bots flooded casual servers and kicked human players, where vote kicking couldn't be done fast enough as the bots outnumbered the opposition.
- It got even worse in 2022, and because of that, it caused the TF2 community to get Valve's attention by making a peaceful online protest called #SaveTF2. Valve finally listened to them on the Team Fortress 2 Twitter account. While the bots are not completely gone, the bots have started to cease and calm down as time went on following June 2022. Unfortunately, Valve's solution had weak effort and they left the game again after applying minimal patches and voting measures that temporarily prevented bots from appearing and within a year later the bots emerged once again.
- This second wave erupted into another movement called #FixTF2 on the 3rd of June 2024 this time focusing on the bot problem rather than content drought which initially had no immediate response until when the 27th of the same month, a sudden ban wave of bots and notorious cheaters or hosters had been enacted. It is not officially confirmed whether Valve intentionally enacted the enforcement as a response to the movement or was a security measure to coincide with the Steam Summer sale. Additionally, it remains to be seen whether Valve is to ensure continued maintenance of their Anti-Cheat.
- As an attempt to prevent further abuse from bots, in the summer of 2020 Valve disabled chat and microphone usage for free-to-play users and only granted back access through purchasing $5 worth of items on Steam for legitimacy purposes. This backfired as the bot hosters used stolen premium accounts or paid to upgrade anyways, and this only hindered free players from not only communicating in the chatbox but also not letting their characters speak voice commands (calling for Medic, spotting a Spy, or requesting a building)! Although this only affects official Valve servers and so community servers are untouched by this restriction, but this change hampers the experience on official servers. Valve still has not lifted this restriction yet as of July 2024 as the bot invasion appears to have ceased.
- The console versions of the game are no longer supported by Valve and have not received any significant changes since 2009; the reason varies by version: the PlayStation 3 version was developed by Electronic Arts, who had no reason to support a game made by a company whose Steam platform competed with their own Origin (now EA Play) platform, while the Xbox 360 version couldn't receive the same updates as the PC version because Microsoft policy at the time was that any update adding new content (IE new weapons and maps) had to be paid DLC packs. No new console versions have been released since.
- Due to Apple dropping support for 32-bit apps on macOS versions 10.15 Catalina and later, players on macOS are forced to use version 10.14 Mojave (the last version with 32-bit app support), which was released back in 2018, and has been out of support by Apple. Players using Macs with the ARM-based Apple Silicon processor will need to use an x86-64 emulator to run the game.
Trivia
- Rick May, the voice actor behind the Soldier, passed away on April 13, 2020, due to complications related to COVID-19. Valve soon updated Team Fortress 2 to include a temporary in-game statue in his honor as well as a new main menu theme (a rendition of Taps).
- Sniper has a bruise on his right thumb (a historically common injury among riflemen).
- Since the June 17, 2011 Patch, there is a 1% chance for Archimedes to fly out of a Scout upon being gibbed. This is a nod to the ending of the promotional video "Meet the Medic", where Archimedes is left inside the Scout's chest after his operation.
- The game was originally intended to be one of the first Source engine games, along with Half-Life 2. However, due to the game's numerous delays, Half-Life 2, Half-Life: Source and Counter-Strike: Source all came out first.
- It spawned a good load of memes, like Heavy's "Pootis spenser here" and Engineer's "nope.avi". New memes are still being made to this day, such as the iconic "Heavy is Dead" GMOD short.
- Team Fortress 2 has created a $50,000,000 hat economy.
- The game has spawned many TF2 characters with strange/bizarre appearances and abilities, named "TF2 Freaks" (i.e. Vagineer, Painis Cupcake, MeeM, Christian Brutal Sniper, Ass Pancakes, Weaselcake, etc.).
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