Scream Fortress X is here…

Scream Fortress X. Yes. X. That means ten in Roman Numerals. Ten. 10. That’s a pretty large number. There’s like, infinity+9 numbers all smaller than 10. For a video game, ten is a HUGE number. But here we are, with Scream Fortress 10.

What’s actually in Scream Fortress 10? Not a lot. It’s a lot like Scream Fortress 9. And Scream Fortress 8. And Scream Fortress 7 as well, actually. There are two Halloween crates – a cosmetics crate and a weapon skin crate. For some reason the cosmetic case is called the Violet Vermin. I thought it was a typo at first and was supposed to be called “Violent Vermin” but no, it’s purple. There are the same contracts and gargoyles as last year. There are two taunts, both of which reuse the cart taunt effects from Carnival of Doom but with some new voice lines. There’s no update page either, so I had to go and make one. It’s pretty much the same as the last two years.

And the worst thing of all? NO SPELLS. The community has been pining for the Halloween Spells from years back. We want them. We really do. Valve could put them in a crate and require a $4 key to open them and people would probably buy them. They’re Halloween-only effects that can only be seen for 1/12 of the year, why can’t they come back?

On the plus side though, there’s some new maps. Five in fact! They’re all really nice community maps too. It’s a shame too many of them are Player Destruction. I never really got the appeal of that mode. Still, the maps ARE really nicely made, and if it wasn’t for the community, I don’t think there would be any real Scream Fortress Halloween shenanigans at all.

Seriously though, the new TF2 maps are REALLY nice. When they load. I think I need to verify the integrity of my game cache since a couple of them crashed my TF2 and also crashed Garry’s Mod when I wanted to open them and take some screenshots. Weirdly though, matchmaking onto the new maps only took an awkwardly long time. I would have assumed that matchmaking would have instantly dumped me into a map, but I waited 5 minutes per map just to get into a match! That’s… annoying.

Scream Fortress X though has kinda been a disappointment. No, not a disappointment. Just… I don’t know. I didn’t expect much at all. The community has waited nearly a year for this update and we got the same as the last two years. Not even a real acknowledgement that it’s been 10 years of Scream Fortress.

But frankly, the games I play most have all had non-existent Halloween events. Warframe just had a repeat of an alert from two years ago, but I can kinda forgive that because they’re working on Fortuna, which has a release date of November. Fortuna is fucking huge, with a ton of new systems and a new map that is like three times the size of the Plains of Eidolon. On the plus side, the mini alert is pretty fun, being unarmed with only 100 health and 100 shields and no abilities is pretty fun. The Juggernaut boss is a but finicky though.

Overwatch also kinda doesn’t really have an event, they’re just repeating last year’s event with a couple of new skins. They’re probably using a similar excuse of working on an update, but I don’t know what Blizzard are working on right now. Probably busy disappointing World of Warcraft fans or something.

I dunno. Being sad at TF2 not having a massive Halloween update seems pretty futile when much newer games aren’t really doing much better. It may have been a bit of a disappointment, but at least it was to be expected.

On the plus side, at least they updated the localization files!