Team Fortress 2 phenomenon

Team Fortress 2 . Does this name mean anything to you?? I think you’ve heard of him at least once. This year the game will be 16 years old, and just from one announcement of the update on the BLOG the community exploded.

Then the question arises: " Why is everyone so interested in a game sixteen years ago??»

Quality of the original product

I’ll start with the most banal thing – the game itself is good. It turned heads from the moment it came out and was a decent game that was fun to play. Some developments were also borrowed by other developers, for example Blizzard in their Overwatch (I advise you to get used to it right away, I will refer to it a lot). In the first 3-5 years, eSports developed, famous organizations came to the game, others organized tournaments for all this (of course, this would not have happened without development on the part of the developers, but more on that later). I would like to mention the simply wonderful art design of the game, which perfectly conveys the mood of the mid-20th century and which is made with attention to detail.

How beautiful it looks.

However, this artistic style required a lot of effort, as stated by the lead developer of TF2 – Robin Walker (sorry for the free translation).

To give you an idea of ​​how long we’ve been working, I’ll give you an example of the weeks of work that went into developing the blood effect when you hit someone. He goes through all these crazy stages of work. Splashes scale differently – they don’t stretch in length like everything else. The effect orients itself perpendicular to the character you’re hitting and intentionally moves outside of the silhouette. So it splashes away from the character, even if you shoot from the front, regardless of the distance. It makes no difference if you are too close to the character and he looks big on the screen, but when you shoot from a distance the spray still flies to the side.

Robin Walker in an interview with RPS

In general, I want to say that the game had a bright future.

The right vector of development

To put it this way, Team Fortress 2 became the first ‘game-service’ in our understanding. Not just any MMO-RPG, but just a shooter session.
The developers from Valve immediately realized that in front of them there was a skeleton that could be equipped with muscles, ligaments and everything else (well, I have examples). A little more than six months after the release, the first major update ‘Gold Rush’ was released.

I won’t dwell on the retrospective for long; it’s important to understand that the game began to be rapidly updated and replenished with content.

Already in that update we added our favorite custom weapons with achievements for which you could get that new weapon.

The screenshot shows that for receiving achievements you could get a new weapon (!), for free (!), just playing the game and having fun (!).

As I said earlier, I won’t dwell on this for long. The important thing is that hats, unusual effects, skins for weapons, and everything in general will be added. Pure water service game.

Team Fortress 2 is an innovator

I’m not afraid to say that the developers of TF2 are real geniuses. One of the reasons for the phenomenon was that the game began to experiment and learned to surprise its player. For example, it became one of the very first paid projects to switch to the Free-To-Play system. Success was not long in coming: the game took off.

This was all the seed for a simple, dare I say it, revolution in the field of multiplayer games: exchange of things and an in-game store. Yes, it was with TF2 that all this chaos with in-game currency and market began. This extravaganza was first added in 2010 as an update for this game. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of trading, so I will not try to do so. Oh, and in this update they added Mann Co Store, the predecessor of all in-game stores.

Now you too can buy, create and sell weapons..
AND GO TO BATTLE!

Saxton Hale

You think everything? Not at all, there’s still more to come. Steam Workshop was also introduced for the first time in one of the TF2 updates. But let’s be honest, the game is still alive at one workshop, and it’s from there that the current one (!) developer and takes content for the game. It really boggles the mind that in one year the game was switched to F2P and this monumental innovation was added. Can you imagine the players’ heads exploding at that time?? You can create a legal mod that could be added to your favorite game, and from which you could also legally earn money.

However, that entire period 2010-2014 was truly https://casinovibes.uk/ outstanding, and I will briefly talk about, in my opinion, less significant innovations:

The annual Saxxy Awards ceremony, dedicated to the release of Source Filmmaker and held until 2018.

A slightly clumsy replay system that allows you to edit your best moments from matches right in the game.

All this made the game simply unrealistically cool, forcing more and more people to come into it and donate. True, then they ruined it all by adding a series of unsuccessful updates and, in fact, killing the game (but more on that another time).

Aggressive Marketing

Another success factor is marketing. It was thanks to him that I was introduced to this great game.
We’ve all seen videos from the series Meet The Team, Expiration Date and others. These videos did such a cool thing as character development. We watch, we like, we remember and become attached to a character. We can see the success of this system in the example of Blizzard, whose videos are extremely popular.

These videos are still the most popular on the Valve channel.

Even draft versions received millions of views. Extravaganza, nothing less.

It is worth mentioning the countless collaborations with many games released on Steam. By pre-ordering or purchasing a certain game, you could get some famous item from there in TF2. Such promotional materials were released in collaboration with such famous games as Fallout: New Vegas, Saints Row: The Third, The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings and others. You can see this entire huge list here.

All these loud slogans (example above with the workshop), comics, plot development, loud announcements and collaborations created an information field around the game, working as excellent marketing. While I was looking for information for this blog, I came across a comment from one StopGame user, showing the full potential of Valve’s advertising campaign.

What a pity that now TF2 is dying, because we won’t see events of this scale, and even with short films. It’s sad that Overwatch 2 is also going down the path, as if deliberately repeating the path of our beloved TF.

Community around the game

I left for last what the game lives on to this day – the game community.
I tend to think this way: this high activity of the game’s community is due to the fact that the developers were able to attract people into their game who can support this game themselves, and this is great! As I already said, the game now works purely due to caring fans. Content for updates, bugfixes, many new modes, servers, mods (!), video – all this is done by the community.

Here is the channel of the well-known Winglet, which makes amazing SFM videos.

What can I say, people manage to make full-length films (!) films based on the game universe.

I think that these are all echoes of those creative competitions like the Saxxy Awards. What can we say, videos about the game still collect a good number of views, and it is clear that the game is really interesting to the majority, but, unfortunately, not on the same scale as before.

I’ll go into a little reflection: the same release of Overwatch 2 cut down the hype of incredible proportions, and many of the disadvantages of the new game acted as black PR, which added to the popularity of the game. I personally became acquainted with Overwatch when I switched to F2P, and I still play it. With great grief they managed to reanimate the corpse of the game and attract people to the game. Yes, the current vector of development of the game is very doubtful, but they did it! How I wish they would pay attention to TF2 too..

So here it is. Creativity is done, new ideas emerge. A loving community carries the game on its fragile shoulders, despite the lack of updates, attention from Valve, the problem of bots and cheaters. A community that the developers themselves attracted and nurtured, absorbing love into this project. The game still has a large online presence, although a certain number are bots.

What can we say, in 2022 the players staged a peaceful protest #savetf2. Their main goal was to attract the attention of developers to the game. One player went to the Valve office, others spammed Twitter and put the hashtag in their Steam nicknames (even I was one). Videos about this event were made even by those YouTubers who never mentioned TF2 at all. Even the voice actors expressed their opinions about it. The hype was on a universal scale, and the developers finally gave in under public pressure.

Back then people really thought they would do something

And here the voice actor of Medic writes that he personally wrote to Valve asking him to pay attention to the game.

True, nothing followed this tweet, except for the very “announcement” of a new update, about which further..

Conclusion

What I started is how I will finish. The game community was simply in seventh heaven, because they were literally told that an update awaited them, which they had been waiting for almost 6 (!) years. However, Valve changed the blog after some time, replacing ‘full-on update-sized’ with ‘holiday-sized’. Essentially, this means that another Swissmass or Scream Fortress awaits us, but about summer.

So why did everyone become so interested in the game after sixteen years?? It’s simple: the developers actively developed the game, fed the fans, and then just up and left. But the TF2 community did not do anything with a finger, they remained waiting, like Hachiko, for the second coming of Jesus, and will remain waiting until the end of their days..

Phew, that’s the end of my writing. Although this is not my first experience with something like this, it was very interesting to write here and for such an audience. Criticism on the case and corrections are EXTREMELY welcome, because with the grammar I could very well mess up. And my deepest bow to you for reading this.
Good luck to you!

Team Fortress 2

Best comments

Content for updates, bugfixes, many new modes, servers, mods (!), video – it’s all done by the community.

You know, when you mentioned everything that the TF-ki community has done and is doing, my soul felt so warm and pleasant. Thank you! I immediately remembered those moments when I was looking forward to SFM from the same Winglet (cool SFM, isn’t it?), when I played on different servers and communicated with people from other cities and regions (gails, trade servers, servers with Saxton Hale mode, for example).

Nice article. In particular, because of the “Holiday-sized update” trick, I lost my last faith in valves. Because while they threw their energy into TF2 just for the sake of another stupid event (most of which the developers are actually asking to make community), and while this is going on, they are transferring the entire CS: GO to Source2 and making a major patch for Dota, and these games would not even last two years on content support like the one with which TF2 has been dragging its feet for more than 5 years! But while on Dota and CS the maximum amount of fragmovies and guides are being cut, on TF2 some were cutting absurd comedy mini-series (STBlackST and its Unussual Troubles series), full-length and half-length films (Emesis Blue and Spy’s Disguise from Fortress Films), a whole army of just short SFM projects, which in general were either incredibly sad, playing on the strings of the soul, or just a little delusional, but from that no less sticky. This game left quite a significant mark on the history of game devs; it is still an incomparable standard of a high-quality team shooter with unique hero classes, which no one has really been able to surpass until now. And it would seem – take it and be happy, you practically have a monopolist in your field (because Overvoshch 2 is painfully persistently hoping to milk money from the fans, and the upcoming XDefiant and The Finals do not inspire much confidence), but no: they hammered home and invested almost all their efforts in Dota, which together with the league shares the lion’s share of fans of the MOBA genre, as well as in CS, which will also begin to compete with the conditional Valorant if Rito will think of adding a drop chance for skins, or their own equivalent of TP Steam.

But this is so, the cry of the soul. The article as a whole is pleasant, it awakened in me a feeling of nostalgia for the bygone years of this masterpiece, like the author.

Yeah, I didn’t think I’d leave so much (!) exclamation marks.
Give me a tank, damn it.

I was happy then for a week, because it was almost my birthday, just a gift from Gaben, eh… It’s a pity that it turned out to be with a catch: S

I was very pleased to plunge into all this. The TF2 community is too wonderful, still a good half of my friends from Steam are from there

well said, I went back 7 years ago. it was cool when the game was actually updated and everyone was interested. I believed in the announcement of the new update so much that I walked around happy all day 🙂

The most soulful project in my memory, with wonderful gameplay, gorgeous visuals and a wonderful community. I haven’t played actively for 4 years now, but I always keep my finger on the pulse of the game and the community. No, no, let’s go with the guys, drive 2fort, badlands, orange and my favorite suijin for a week and put this masterpiece away for a while in the most prominent place in my Steam library. Thanks for the article, good job)