Medic’s Opinions on the new Decorated Weapons

Meh. Lots and lots of meh.

Okay, let’s be somewhat serious here and have an actual conversation about all of these dramatic changes that have suddenly appeared in TF2. It’s clear as day that hats no longer sell. So Valve has turned to weapons and taunts, things that people do actually see, even while they’re killing people. Hats were going to have to die down at some point, we have over 1000 of them, not all of them technically hats, but still, that’s a lot. There’s not enough backpack space to actually own every hat in the game.

So here we are with decorated weapons. Valve’s brand new *cough* idea to spruce up our bland, peasant weapons. Stock weapons only, mind you. And not even all of them. The two weapons that I actually wanted to see decorated, the Spy’s Knife and the Demoman’s Grenade Launcher, were both left out. As was my Syringe Gun. No melee weapons at all were included in this update.

I suppose I should get the pleasantries out of the way first. The cow-patterned flamethrower is awesome. I’ll probably never get one, but I’m a sucker for cows splotches. If I had one, I’d give it to my mum as incentive to play TF2 with us. She likes burning things (both intentionally and otherwise) and she absolutely adores cows, so a cow-patterned flamethrower would make her day.

The wear on the weapons is nice too. I know it’s carried straight over from CS:GO, but it does add a bit of unique-ness with these weapons. A bit like, I dunno, renaming your weapon or throwing a ton of strange counters on one or a killstreak kit or something. Except more random, and with just as much a chance to give you something you don’t like as completing a Mann VS Machine tour. And only for limited stock weapons, rather than almost every weapon on the game.

Some of the military camo and lightning weapons are cool too. It’s the rocket launchers and flamethrowers that look really impressive in most cases. Smaller weapons – the pistols and revolvers, are too small to really matter. The bigger the weapon, generally the better it looks, the more pattern you can see on it. Although camouflage patterns seem rather pointless when they’re in bright purple. Many of the patterns are a bit weird too. The cow flamethrower is weird. So is the corn-coated Minigun. Why would you have a Minigun with a wooden muzzle? Wouldn’t that burn?

Then there’s the Medi Guns. They all look terrible. I tried to like them, but I just can’t. They’re so bright and over the top. They’re so… anti-Medic, if that makes sense. Medi Guns are things of science, they look stupid coated in wrapping paper. It’s just as ludicrous as the Australium wrench – Engineer would never keep something as ostentatious as that on his person. Feels like the whole idea is some fantasy of the Scout, who would totally decorate his weapons, because he’s lame like that.

The worst one is the atom-patterned Medi Gun. Bloody hell that one looks awful.

In the end though, we already have botkillers, festive weapons, strange weapons and killsteak kits and sheens. Wrapping paper around your flamethrower seems a tad over the top. And it’s yet another thing to complicate and bloat the game.

Thank you to Davjo for the images.