Are you well, Team Fortress 2?
The time for a Team Fortress 2 summer update has been and gone. There was nothing. While the TF2 blog has been somewhat alive, with a post every few weeks (as opposed to the massive news droughts we’ve had in the past) there has been almost nothing in regards to updates. The Meet your Match update was the last big update we had, and that happened over a year ago, back in July 2016. It’s now September 2017 and since then all we have seen is the odd crate, a 2016 rehash of 2015’s Scream Fortress and a mediocre Smissmas crate update. That’s it.
Normally, I wouldn’t be the sort of person to start worrying and panicking and saying that Team Fortress 2 is a dead game. It’s not, it’s still up there as one of the most played games on Steam. Team Fortress 2 is a brilliant first person shooter and the grandfather of Overwatch and all these Hero Shooters that are coming out right now. It still sees between thirty and fifty, sometimes even sixty thousand people loading up the game every single day. Of course, being Free To Play and not having any Pay to Win elements does help. Plus the fact that it’s a silly, not at all serious shooter that kids can play helps a lot too…
My point is, Team Fortress 2 is a good game.
But other games are catching up and overtaking. Both PAYDAY 2 and Warframe, two games regularly talked about here, often rival Team Fortress 2 in terms of player count. Team Fortress 2 used to be lodged in at number 3 on Top Games By Player Count, but now it hovers around anywhere below number 5 – the situation having made to look worse ever since PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS suddenly topped the scoreboard.
A random aside, anyone else feel like PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS is always SHOUTING at you? Maybe that’s part of the reason why it’s so popular. It screams at you to try it.
Anyway, back to Team Fortress 2. While there are always going to be people who will continue to play the game – most notably traders and people involved in (community) competitive – the lack of an update for so long is… noticeable. Even though I essentially stopped playing regularly back in Scream Fortress 2016, I used to always pop by whenever a new update hit, just to have a bit of fun, try out new things and write new articles. But there’s essentially been a year of nothing. No Pyro update. No Heavy update. No generic themed update with a crate and a few new maps. Not even proper contracts or anything. I’m definitely not alone when it comes to updates. Most people tend to pop by if something cool is going on in a game they like.
That’s how PAYDAY 2 and Warframe both got boosts in players. They are regularly updated, easily accessible and seem to have things actually going on inside them. The Plains of Eidolon for example might be a while away, but there’s been content and teasers since the announcement – heck, a whole new Arca weapon and armour set just got released a few days ago and there’s going to be brand new gameplay footage in a stream on Friday the 15th.
But there has been TALKS about an update. The TF2 team have made a few blog posts about it. That’s… pretty much all that has been said though. This update has been coming soon for a long time. To the point that the joke of what happens first, the Pyro update or Half-Life 3, can technically be answered. The answer is Half-Life 2: Episode 3’s leaked story ending letter thing. It reaches a point where people no longer really care. The hype fades away.
And when the update does eventually come? It might not have been worth the wait. Sadly, considering how dry and empty 2017 has been for Team Fortress 2, I worry that we’ll even have a Scream Fortress update. It’s September now, there was no summer update, or any real update at all.
What if there won’t be any more updates?
It’s a scary question, but one worth asking. And before anyone goes and says “they would tell us if they were no longer updating TF2!”, bollocks to that. They never said they were going to stop updating their other games. They left us hanging indefinitely when it came to Half-Life 3 or Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Valve are content to leave us hanging for eternity. Complete silence has worked for them in the past, why stop now?
Although chances are, I’ll schedule this article and the next day, an update will happen. That’s happened to me a lot in the past (especially with that old Medic Week I did).
But these days… I’m not so sure…
“No generic themed update with a crate and a few new maps.”
To be fair, they did have the Rainy Day update (https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Rainy_Day_Pack) which did nothing except add some crates, keys, and new cosmetics, pretty generic TF2 update.
Currently, the TF team is so small that if they actually finished the Pyro update in under a year, it’d probably be rushed and riddled with errors so r/tf2 can point and complain, though again that’s basically r/tf2’s default state apart from reposting memes.
I have some hopes, though. They put out the balance changes blog post. The community sent lots of feedback. The Scout’s voice actor has confirmed having finished his voice acting for the Jungle update, and the update’s trailer by The Winglet has been completed. We could use some more official blog posts notifying the community of the team’s progress, but at least we got that balance changes post, as well as many other places (interviews? tweets?) confirming various things.
Of course, there’s no way to know for sure until they actually release the update. Let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best.
Thing is, they’ve already missed the big summer update and they haven’t made their annual blog post mentioning Scream Fortress. There was no minor update in April/May either, and the Scream Frortress/Smissmas 2016 updates were bare bones to say the least. We might not see any real new updates until 2018. And if this big update is bad, then people will give up entirely.
True. I doubt the Pyro update will meet the impossibly high standards the community has set (that’s what you get when you overhype an update *COUGH COUGH*). Still, as long as it addresses common issues, does ok rebalancing, doesn’t break the game, etc, it shouldn’t be too bad.
If it sucks…
R.I.P. TF2 2007-2017
With the TF2 team, an update can go anywhere. And their recent track record is pretty bad…