![]() ![]() ![]() According to Walker, it wasn’t until well after the Mann-Conomy Update that the studio put any real thought into the idea of free-to-play. Valve’s original goal for TF2 was not free-to-play. “It was actually a really simple decision to us – at the point where the bulk of our revenue was coming from existing users, it seemed obvious that we should stop charging people who wanted to join in.” When asked about the thought process behind this massive change, Walker says it was easy. The Uber Update turned Team Fortress 2 into a free-to-play game. New items, new weapons for every class except the engineer, and the “ Meet The Medic” animated short were just the tip of the iceberg, because this update changed the game in a more significant way than just adding new content. “So we decided we'd aim for a system where microtransactions were focused on purely cosmetic things, in the hopes that it would still be interesting enough to players.” Walker also said the most challenging aspect of this was figuring out what people would spend money on that wouldn’t break the game’s balance or ruin the experience for players who didn’t spend money. But the business model of only selling the game itself has a very indirect relationship to that.The Mann-Conomy aimed to fix that by aligning the development and business models – if we could do that, we could relax and just focus on keeping our existing players happy.” Our development model was to run the game as a service, which meant continually adding new content to TF2. “It was a bit of an obvious discrepancy between our development and business models. “Until the Mann-Conomy update, our only method of making money with TF2 was through selling more copies of the game,” says Walker. Store, where players can buy and sell weapons, crates full of random loot, and keys to open those crates, alongside the item trading system, was the beginning of Team Fortress 2’s massive in-game economy. So – hats!”Īfter years of adding items to the game through achievements and random drops, Valve finally made the leap to microtransactions. The only zone around their body that was never intersected by any of their animations was above their head. We wanted to attach some new geometry onto them, without the geometry intersecting any of the rest of their body during any of those animations. Each character had several hundred animations, in which they moved their arms and legs around in all kinds of ways. “We had nine characters who'd been designed without the expectation that we'd ever attach anything to them. Why hats, as opposed to any other cosmetic item? “ actually a very technically driven choice,” says Team Fortress 2’s lead designer Robin Walker. Then there’s the introduction of hats, which have gone on to become the backbone of the game’s economy. Spy also debuted the first of many popular comic strips Valve made for Team Fortress 2. Four new maps were brought to the game, including Pipeline, the first map for the Payload Race game type, which has both teams pushing their own cart of explosives while stopping the enemy from doing the same. ![]() The update also changed the way new weapons are unlocked to include an item drop system. Both the Sniper and Spy received three new weapons. ![]() Spy Update, as the name implies, heavily impacted two classes. While the first four major updates to Team Fortress 2 focused on specific classes, the Sniper vs. Payload has since received 12 additional official maps and has become very popular among players. The map Gold Rush was released as the first Payload map in Team Fortress 2, requiring the offense to push an explosives-laden cart into the enemy’s base before time runs out. Gold Rush gave the medic the Blutsauger, a primary weapon that decreases the rate of health regeneration but increases health when shooting enemies the Kritzkrieg, a Medi Gun replacement that gives critical hits to teammates when ÜberCharged instead of making them invincible and the Ubersaw, which has a slower swing rate than the default melee weapon, but increases the ÜberCharge meter with each hit. The update, named after the map that came with it, became known as the Medic Update among fans due to the weapon releases, which changed the way the medic class could be played. The first major content update for Team Fortress 2 brought a new map, a new mode called payload, three new medic weapons, and the “ Meet the Scout” animated short. Since today marks the 10 year anniversary of the release, here are the seven best Team Fortress 2 updates over the game’s first decade, with insight from our interview with the lead designer about the transition to microtransactions and a free-to-play model. This surely wouldn’t be possible without all the free updates Valve has released for the game. Team Fortress 2 is now over a decade old, but it consistently ranks among Steam’s top 10 games in terms of active player count. ![]()
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