Happy New Year! I hope…

Welp, it’s 2015 now. At least for Ol’Medic here writing this article. It won’t be 2015 for another 7 hours or so according to the blog’s internal clock, but that’s the sort of stuff that happens when we all live in different time zones.

So yes, happy new year! I hope. Let’s take a few minutes of your precious time to see how 2014 went, at least for TF2. In the real world, it was turmoil as always, with chaos in the Middle East and on the borders of Russia and Ukraine, not to mention Ebola being a bastard and getting people ill. Then again, most years are crappy for the majority of people. Part of last year was spent in crippling depression for me, but I pushed out of that. Because I’m a stubborn bitch.

How about TF2 though? Has it been a good year for TF2? Eh…

Last year, the TF2 team promised us big things. They said that 2014 would be amazing and that they should get back to work to make sure none of it would be delayed. There were lots of things to look forward to: Halloween, another big pile of weapon changes, End of the Line, whatever that bread was and the moon base stuff. It all sounded so exciting!

What did we get in the end? Well, we DID get bread. It was part of Expiration Date, a nice little short. That was fun. Got some new weapons too, and Demoknights were all forced into using the Tide Turner. We also got new taunts, which we hadn’t seen since the Brutal Legend and Meet the Medic taunts. Ah, fun.

We also got a Halloween update. This one was even crazier than last year, as there was no boss, just karts. And ducks.

We also got End of the Line, eventually. That was ruined though by a lack of free content outside the video. The unfitting duck minigame was pay to participate. The hats were all pay to get. So was the single melee reskin. It was a small content update.

What we didn’t get is a moon base update.

But another unusual thing we got was the return of the TF2 Beta, now part of the actual game. It’s now being used to test a couple of maps, rd_asteroid, pl_cactuscanyon and altered CTF versions of Foundry and Gorge, for the new Mannpower game mode. This sounds like a good thing, and changes were made to these maps. Unfortunately, I fear Valve will forget about it all. Cactus Canyon in particular is already fading from memory.

Valve decided to wait until the end of this year to do, well, anything non-Halloween-y, really. We did get some interesting weapons, as well as revised changes to the Demoman and a lot of his weapons. Their efforts though were stained by what they did (or more, didn’t do) with the EotL update.

Last but not least, the comic was still late. We probably won’t see the end of it until 2017.

So was this year a good year for TF2? Eh. I don’t know. There was far too much upset. Sure, there’d been upsets in previous years, but EotL, trading issues and the initial Demoman nerf from the Love and War update, not to mention the overuse of ducks, has put this year far, far down the list of good years.

Oh well. Cheers, and let’s hope 2015 is kind to us.

Love you all, and happy new year!