Valve's Team Fortress 2 has been far from the developer's top priorities for some time, and that's evident from today's new batch of Summer cosmetic items, which break the longest dry spell in the game's history. Despite retaining a sizable player base of tens of thousands of monthly unique users and achieving its peak player count just six months ago, the free-to-play shooter has not seen a major content update since 2017's Jungle Inferno. Since then, there has only been a steady supply of new cosmetic items, coming in collections players can unlock from loot boxes or purchase off the Steam marketplace. While there used to be a reliable number of new hats and bug fixes per year, even those have become more infrequent in recent times.
Valve as a company has seen major shifts since its days as a reliable game developer, which could go some way to explaining the drought in new Team Fortress 2 happenings. After spending years attempting to transition into hardware with the Steam Controller, Steam Machine computers, and the Valve Index VR headset, the release of Half-Life: Alyx has seen renewed motivation place on Valve's gaming output. Even so, the age of Team Fortress 2 and the bigger success of DOTA 2 and especially Counter-Strike: Global Offensive dull the possibility of a major TF2 project in the future.
Today's patch and added cosmetics, detailed on Steam, are the first update for Team Fortress 2 since March, the longest gap in the game's fourteen-year history. Alongside fixes to Snakewater and Process and some tweaks to server management in a continuing effort to take control of Team Fortress 2's issue with bot accounts, Valve added 18 additional cosmetics via a new loot box that drops as players spend time in-game. These cosmetics are tradable and marketable for those just looking to grab what they want, and they can come with a variety of Unusual effects for the extremely lucky few who end up opening one of TF2's rarest drops.
Among the new cosmetics are a new bot-themed visor for the Engineer, fast food cosmetics for Scout, and a boxing glove headband for the Heavy known as the Two Punch Mann. The rarest item in this particular crate is the Ballooniphones, a pair of headphones for all characters themed after the Pyro's imaginary friend Ballonicorn. For those unfamiliar, the character is the closest Team Fortress 2 gets to the rainbow world of Fall Guys outside of the existing costume crossover.
As is usual with Team Fortress 2 cosmetics, most of the items can be customized with paint, name tag, and description tag, and some of the hats will drop with a Strange quality that lets players track their points while the item is equipped. The crate will likely last throughout Steam's upcoming Summer sale and then disappear from the rotation, ensuring that the Mann-Conomy continues to run smoothly.
While Team Fortress 2 faithful will continue to support the game and ask for updates for a long while, the fact that the title is fourteen years old means that it's already outlived almost every other online-focused game out there. Even the mighty World of Warcraft has slowed down somewhat in its update output, and Valve simply doesn't seem interested in doing anything other than approving cosmetics for the game and watching the money roll in. Gamers may see a Team Fortress follow-up one day, but it may still be a Half-Life 3-sized wait.
Source: Steam