Cosmetics we should have had by now

There are a lot of hats in Team Fortress 2. A lot. That’s an understatement. There are so many hats that the Mann Co. catalogue is buckling underneath the weight of all the pages in it, describing every hat. Crafting your three refined can get you pretty much anything from a baseball cap to a mask to a rose on your chest to a cat in your pocket to, amazingly, nothing at all. Never really made sense that you can craft the hatless Scout, Sniper and Engineer hats. That being said, there’s always room for more hats.

Well, I say hats, I don’t always mean hats. We already have a load of fedoras for Spy and a bunch of somewhat gentlemanly German stuff for Medic. We need silly stuff. It doesn’t matter whether a hat is impractical for battle or anything, because some Snipers run around balancing apples on their heads.

First off, we need some gender-swapped stuff. Medic has the Geisha Boy. Pyro’s got some assorted bits and pieces. But why don’t we have a skirt for Scout yet? Come on, that’d be awesome. Heck, let’s upgrade it to a full on ballerina costume, like Heavy. There’s no reason why Scout can’t have a skirt and tights, if Heavy can be a ballerina every full moon. Spy should get a full length ball gown as well.

While we’re busy making Scout attractive to men and women alike, we ought to have a look at the other mercenaries. Particularly people like Spy and Medic, who are absolutely covered in clothing. Neck to toe in the stuff. Demoman, Pyro, Soldier and Sniper aren’t much better. Heavy does occasionally show off his arms with the right shirt cosmetics, but it’s not enough. We need SHIRTLESS mercenaries! It’s not like that suit or that body armour are stopping bullets and rockets, so let’s just get rid of it and run around topless. But not completely naked. Because that’d be both unsightly and impractical. And painful.

You don’t actually need to go completely shirtless though. Just show a bit of skin. The way I see it, if we’re going to sexualise some people, let’s go and sexualise everyone. So, let’s take off Spy’s shirt underneath his jacket, whip off Sniper’s shirt and open up Medic’s lab coat.

So, let’s move on from the sexy stuff, throw away those tissues and concentrate on other things. Do you lot remember the Lumbricus Lid? Possibly not. It was a very early promotional item for the Soldier, made for Worms Reloaded. It had a nice little effect whenever you did the Kamikaze taunt – the Hallelujah sound from the Holy Hand Grenade would play and any kills have a unique kill icon. Earbuds also have a unique effect. Not only do they emit little musical notes when worn, they have a chance of turning a player into a trader. I’ve always wondered why we haven’t had more items like this. The most recent ones were the bird heads, the Magical Mercenary and the Second Opinion. Not every hat should be like the Lumbricus Lid, but they add flavour.

Speaking of flavour, what about a complete lack of it? We’ve had the robot skins for MvM for a while and they’d make for cool cosmetics. Problem is, robots don’t have all the animations the normal, non-mechanical mercenaries have, so you get a lot of T-poses and bad stuff. But what if, instead of flat out turning our mercenaries into robots, we instead turned them into cyborgs? Completing tours gets you random robo-limbs that replace your perfectly fine fleshy arms. Cool, eh?

As well as mechanical add-ons, we could have organic add-ons as well. We already have a lot of organic parts, like the Para-sight for Demoman or the majority of Pyro’s Halloween items, but we could always have more. Medic has the Purity Wings, Pyro has demonic wings, we need more wings. Hermes wings for Scout when? Fins for Pyro so we can have Pyranhas? Hmmmph.

But I will pass on gender-swapped models. The models by Chemical Alia are really wonderful, but they would end up either as exact duplicates of the normal mercs with higher pitched voices, or we’d have to work them into completely new characters. The latter would be far better, but maybe it’s not the time for that, especially when the mercs themselves aren’t fully developed, and we have to build on the TFC mercs too.

Last but not least is a more practical cosmetic idea. I’ve only seen this mentioned a few times over the years, but it’d make a LOT more sense, especially on classes with non-visual weapons that have passive up/downsides. Quite simply, why won’t we have cosmetics that place our inactive weapons on our belts or backs? Simple, right?