I Love Team Fortress 2

The one and only, Irreplaceable

I know I said my next post would be about car design, don’t worry, I’m still working on that one, enjoy this in the meantime.

I didn’t grow up playing CoD like most guys my age, I was a Nintendo kid, I had a Wii and a DS Lite. I think you could get CoD in some form on those consoles but suffice it to say they were not high priority titles for the user base. The first shooter I got into once I had my own computer was Team Fortress 2, and God I love it.

where would we be without those SFMs

Culture

Yes, it’s full of trannies now, and back in the day it was full of furries and bronies, nothing has really changed. Same retards, different fetish. Much like iFunny it was like a constant war between the fags and offensive players, today you can get on TF2 and see someone with pronouns in their username, call them a faggot, and then watch a big fight break out in chat, with roughly equal support on both sides.

The community is full of complete retards who will gladly drop whatever serious gameplan they had just to pursue something funny. Class stacking, uber chains, trolldiering, demoknight, fat scout. If a guy misses all his shots and you just stand still and look at him he’ll probably killbind in shame. I could name tons of stupid shit like this, and you’ll see it in regular lobbies. The game is casual in the best way, you can screw around and nobody really cares, you can leave in the middle of a match and the game doesn’t punish you for it.

Recently I was playing a round with a friend of mine and this one guy, we’ll call him Frank because I can’t remember what his username was, kept going on about his master plan to win the game. I thought it would be funny, so I decided to go along with it. The plan, as it turned out, was to get a teleporter behind enemy lines and defeat them amidst the ensuing chaos. You see the trouble is that this was a payload map and we were on defense, so what actually happened is that half of our team wound up in the back of the map where no action was happening, and the other half got stomped by the remaining Blu players. As the final point was being captured, I voiced my first and final remark in the voice chat; “Frank I will skin you alive”. As the round ends in our defeat, he calls me and my friend (who had no contact with Frank up to this point as far as I know) tryhards, and leaves the server. A fascinating interaction, makes me think of the MonarchTrump textposts where the opponent walks away muttering to himself. This is the kind of thing you can expect to see regularly. In a way it’s like VRChat, a zoo of strange people, with the bonus feature of an actual game to play.

Gameplay

The game itself is also something you won’t really find elsewhere. If you play it you’ll immediately understand that it’s fundamentally different from most other shooters. That’s because TF2 is a movement shooter. Descended from Quake, the game has a very long time to kill, and very free movement. When you engage an enemy, you generally don’t do so from behind cover, but out in the open. You dance around the enemy, dodging their shots while trying to land your own, a sort of “footsies” gameplay comparable to a fighting game. This is in stark contrast to the majority of shooters these days where you basically die immediately if the enemy sees you before you see him. This difference is the core reason why I never enjoy any shooter the way I enjoy TF2.

Many people also categorize TF2 as a Hero Shooter, I disagree with this categorization because it lumps it in with games like Overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, etc. that operate completely differently. TF2 is Class-Based for sure, but really look at what the TF2 classes are capable of compared to these other games. No TF2 class has an “Ult” that just does a shitload of damage on use, no TF2 class can put up a shield that forces enemies to move in, or call rockets to strike from the sky, neither can they teleport themselves, or use drones to look at other parts of the map. These things are absolutely insane and would never fit in the balance of TF2. The craziest things by far are Ubercharge, which the Medic has to build up through actively healing his teammates over a very long time, and then has to be used on another player who can deal substantial damage for it to have any effect, and the Engineer’s buildings, that take a lot of time to build and upgrade, and then need constant maintenance to keep them from being destroyed or running out of ammo. The TF2 classes are set apart from each other primarily by what weapons they can use, and secondarily by their movement and health, not by what MOBA abilities they can activate. Not to mention there are only nine of them. TF2’s mechanics are wacky, but they’re far more grounded than the things you see in these other games.

With the bot crisis resolved some time ago, the game’s player base saw a serious resurgence, proving that the game is unique and timeless. I encourage you to queue up for a casual match and enjoy a certified hood classic while verbally berating the other players like the old days.