I made a Scream Fortress 12 Update Page and don’t know what to do with it.
So, uh, yeah. Team Fortress 2 had an update. I haven’t actually opened Team Fortress 2 to see what it was, but it’s here. In fact, it’s the Scream Fortress update. Weirdly though, the Scream Fortress update came insanely early this year. Normally it’s the middle of the month, stretching into the first week of November. This year though? Literally an entire month and then some!
What’s actually in this update though?
Oh, nothing much, just your standard Scream Fortress update. No fun update page like in the past. A bunch of cosmetics and war paints. Some new Halloween-only unusual and taunt unusual effects. Some community maps. And all the previous year events coming back, alongside the Soul Gargoyle and Merasmissions. Which definitely work now.
If you’re really lucky, there may be balance tweaks.
The cosmetics are alright.
I mean, it’s your normal Halloween sort of stuff. There’s a nice, super rare all-class hat, there’s some other all-class hats and some horrific head replacers like the Mannvich. It’s… kinda the same as every year.
We also have the corpse of Balloonicorn as a cosmetic, which is further proof that the Racoonicorn of old SPUF legend could definitely exist at some point.
This year also comes with a case of Scream Fortress war paints. But I personally never really cared for war paints in general. Not going to say they’re bad, but they seem cool. Or at least that was what I thought – the Steam Market isn’t giving me previews of them. A bright white ghost-like war paint would be fitting as the super rare item in a crate.
Unfortunately, the cosmetic spells are not back.
Maps are alright too.
We got two old map reskins and two maps this year. Badwater has been begging for a Halloween skin for ages. Hassle Castle is a reskin of Upward. Throw spells on both and it’s absolute carnage. It’s not Halloween though without spells.
The other two maps, Moldergrove is an event version of a map called Undergrove which hasn’t been added yet, and Megalo is a haunted train station. They’re standard Halloween maps. Atmospheric and filled with pumpkins and fun, but sadly most players will forget they exist once Halloween is over.
Wait Mannpower changes?
And then we have… Mannpower changes? We actually have a long, long list of Mannpower changes! Genuine balance changes! I honestly thought this was a joke at first, but the number of balance changes for Mannpower is actually longer than the list of Halloween changes on the TF2 update page! I genuinely can’t comment on the changes though because I refuse to play Mannpower. No matter how much balancing you do, Mannpower removes the core strengths and weaknesses of the classes in favour of silly power-ups and grappling hooks.
That being said, there are a LOT of heavy nerfs aimed towards Medic in Mannpower. You no longer get the Quick-Fix Free Ride tether effect and you’re massively penalized for healing targets with power-ups. You can also no longer backstab enemies by grappling on to them as well, and Heavies no longer get jump boosts from grappling.
Clearly, Mannpower is someone’s pet project. Someone who occasionally updates Team Fortress 2 likes it enough to update it occasionally. I want to say that maybe these changes were added to make the update more update-y, but that’s not true. They added a whole new marked for death feature for players who are severely outpacing everyone else, like the domination system but with actual drawbacks.
Weird.
Anyway, here’s the update page in all its glory.
Okay, admittedly it’s just one image. And yes, it’s just the update page from Scream Fortress 7. But at least it’s an update page! One that amusingly tells you what the update actually consists of! Kinda!
Valve will never make one of their own. So I guess I’ll just continue to do the work for them.