Scream Fortress has been somewhat cancelled, for good or bad?

There’s been a new blog post over at Team Fortress.com and for some it brings good news, others not so good news. In it, the Team Fortress team explains how they’ve been busy working hard (and watering the potted plant for a change) and they mention some of the up coming things that they are working on. The TF team also explains how, because they’re working on all this new cool stuff, our yearly Halloween event has been cancelled.

Scream Fortress has been a bit of a tradition for the last 5 years, starting off with modest Harvest_event and finishing last year with the bug-tacular Carnival of Doom. It’s sad to see a bit of TF2 tradition go, but if this means we’re making way for new things, then so be it. Plus, Valve has opened the doors for the community to go insane, saying they want to add the best of the community’s Halloween work. They mentioned hats AND maps, which is interesting. On the flip side, Carnival of Doom was a bit disappointing anyway, so goodness knows what a half-assed, lacking-time Scream Fortress would look like.

Small caveat here though for the community Halloween stuff. Apparently this year’s cosmetic items are ALL going to be non-restricted. Apparently. Whether Valve will stick true to this, I don’t know, but that means there’s going to be a lot more distracting cosmetics around, as if things like the banana hat and the fricking Max’s Head weren’t bad enough. I do hope that this change means we’ll get to see other items unrestricted, like the Emerald Jarate backpack and Sniper’s vampire hunter set. The more subtle Halloween items that look perfectly fine otherwise.

Scream Fortress though is a small price to pay if it means we’re getting maintenance work, new stuff and whatever ‘perf’ is supposed to be. A lot of stuff.

… new maps, cosmetics, and a new campaign with contracts and weapon collections. We’re also working on things like competitive matchmaking, perf, balance improvements and moving Mannpower Mode out of beta with a new map.

As quoted from their own blog. Will they actually do it? Maybe. Valve are known to change their minds on this stuff. It is somewhat relieving to hear them say that they really ARE kinda working on things like balance and matchmaking. Mannpower though, why are they still pushing it? The majority of experienced TF2 players think it’s stupid and it spits in the face of class composition and the idea of classes in general. We’ve gone over this loads of times.

New maps and cosmetics as well are also, well… We already get all of that from the community. We make stuff to Valve can wrap it up and sell it back to us, so the fact that they’re working on their own cosmetics and maps should mean they’re doing something brand new that the community can’t make itself. New assets that we’ll later rip apart and manipulate, just like we did with the carts. Because, if I’m honest, their latest map, Powerhouse, doesn’t compare balance-wise to Borneo. Valve needs to pull out the stops here to impress us with maps and cosmetics.

Then there’s campaigns. If it’s going to be like the last set, then how hard can it be? I can only assume it’ll be somewhat similar (if not harder) contracts with different skins as rewards. A new contract will probably come out with some new maps, so that’s probably where all the energy is going. Hopefully they’ll have listened to our feedback and won’t be charging so damn much to open crates that we’ve already paid 6 dollars/whatever for, the challenges will be harder and the whole system doesn’t give up whenever the item system goes down. And maybe tweak the drop rates a bit so we have more of a chance of stranges and less of a chance of getting the exact same items multiple times in a row.

I’m alright with giving up a proper Scream Fortress for a bigger future update, but it had better be worth it.