Team Fortress 2 has displayed a tremendous staying power in the video game industry, lasting over sixteen years, with a continuous monthly player count of over 90,000 according to Steamcharts. This is even more impressive when considering that the game has not had any major updates since 2017, with the Jungle Inferno (with the exception of Halloween related events released every year with Scream Fortress 2), as reported by Game Rant. This makes their February 9th announcement for a brand new update that much more exciting for players who have remained invested in this game for so long.
Team Fortress 2 officially released an announcement by blog on their website detailing the notable, though limited information that could be presented at the time. The TF2 team began their announcement with self-deprecation, joking about the old-fashioned method of releasing this information in the form of a blog, before getting into the three major notes of the announcement:
Steam Workshop Creators, can we have your attention please. The following message is so urgent, so time-sensitive, we made the executive decision to skip TikTok and Twitter entirely and break the glass on the most bleeding-edge communication technology available.
Welcome to the future. Welcome… to a “blog-post”.
“Wow!” you’re probably thinking. “I forgot how hard reading is!” Yeah, it’s scary how fast you lose that. Don’t worry, we’ll be brief:
The last few Team Fortress summer events have only been item updates. But this year, we’re planning on shipping a full-on update-sized update — with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?! Which means we need Steam Workshop content! YOUR Steam Workshop content!
So get to work! (Or back to work, if you were already working but got distracted when the entire internet simultaneously found out about this state-of-the-art blog-post.) Make sure to get your submissions into the Steam Workshop by May 1st, so they can be considered for this as-yet-unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed) (unless you wanted to develop summer-themed stuff) update.
While it has been many years since they have released a major update, many patch notes have been sprinkled into the game to fix and update pre-existing content. Recently, these updates have been made to keep up with the rampant bot issue according to Kotaku, however, none of these updates brought anything new to the game. The first point of note was that this update was going to introduce new content. This announcement made sure to let their audience know it would not be another small update. In their list of new ideas planned they mentioned new items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints, and, in their own words, “who knows what else!?”
The second point of note was that Team Fortress 2 is asking for submissions of Steam Workshop content from the community that may potentially be used in the upcoming update. The deadline for these submissions is May 1st, which they made sure to highlight with apparent urgency.
The last point of note was that this event was to be released in summer. They elaborate on this point joking that although this event was situated in summer, the event was not summer themed, at least not as far as they had planned up to this point.
With all of these plans in the works, people are excited to see what is in store for Team Fortress 2. Though very little has been officially announced, many aspects of these updates have been teased, which has been cause for speculation, and anticipation for the summer.