#SaveTF2
The first First Person Shooter I ever played was Left 4 Dead, followed by Garry’s Mod. When I bought Garry’s Mod, I had a choice, I could get Counter-Strike: Source or Team Fortress 2, two of the games needed to make Garry’s Mod work. Back then, Garry’s Mod required a Source game to run at all, and I picked the bright and colourful Team Fortress 2 over the rather dark and dusty Counter-Strike. That decision right there, my choosing Team Fortress 2, has utterly shaped me as a human being.
Seriously. Team Fortress 2 changed my life. For the better. Via Team Fortress 2, I ended up joining a caring (and chaotic) community, the Steam Powered User Forums (where the SPUF in the Daily SPUF comes from), and I dipped my toes into all sorts of TF2 history. I made friends, I played competitive, I unlocked my desire to write and I got to play an amazing game that still, to this day, is still utterly unique.
I mean, it’s pretty obvious what TF2 means to me. After all, I have spent YEARS being called Medic, and have only somewhat recently been beginning to change my usernames. I had hours upon hours in Team Fortress 2, about 69% of that time just playing Medic. Reaching a grand total of about 1700 hours. That’s still more than every other game I’ve played, aside from Warframe, Pokemon GO and Minecraft.
But even when we put my personal experiences aside, Team Fortress 2 is a masterpiece of a game. For a game where you just murder each other and push carts around, the environment is rich with both chaos and a unique sense of balance, all done in a cartoon-like art style that still holds its own to this day. The graphics, the sounds, the amazing characters. everything about Team Fortress 2 has a style that other games just can’t mimic.
Not everything that came from TF2 is good. Thanks to TF2, we have micro-transactions and loot crates, things that are now extremely common. Cosmetic items are overflowing everywhere and people can make themselves not look blue or red. There are so many cosmetics now that team identification is a threat. At the same time though, TF2’s implementation of these things are all cosmetic, since we get random weapon drops. Heck, even the weapons are side grades. You can very easily play TF2 without a single unlocked weapon, just using completely vanilla classes, and still be a top-scoring player.
Team Fortress 2 though isn’t just important to me. The game has had a massive effect on pretty much every one, especially aabicus. In fact, aabicus goes into long details as to WHY TF2 is such an amazing and still unique game.
No matter how you look at it, Team Fortress 2 is an utterly amazing game, one that has sent ripples through the entirety of video games. Hardly any other games have had the same effect that Team Fortress 2 has. But on its own, Team Fortress 2 is nothing, and the community can only do so much to keep the game running. The game is on life support, infested with bots in normal servers. Yet we’re all still here, loyal to the aging beast. We can’t let such an amazing game fade away into obscurity.
And that is why we need to #SaveTF2.