The Wake of Team Fortress 2

 Hope you prepared a speech.

When we think about what we come to know as the Legends of the video game industry, few games out there who have lived as long as Team Fortress 2 has. Team Fortress 1? Never heard of it, couldn't pick it out from a line up? Mario? The guy has some staying power, but people go back to his games out of nostalgia, not to be routinely challenged. (That's what Kaizo and Cat Mario reimaginings are for) Counter-Strike? Well that is a game with some hefty legs on it but even then, TF2 beats it in the long stride by a clear stretch of 5 or so years. We're talking an online multiplayer shooter that has remained active and played throughout the entire lifespan of some newer online games in recent years. Elder Scrolls Legends lived and died, Anthem came and went, every Call of Duty since Modern Warfare has expended countless online lifecycles (with obvious exception to Warzone), and all the while Team Fortress 2 has remained open for business, run by the enigmatic purview of what I can only assume is an obsessive yet detached online AI operating system who lives to watch humans whittle away their lives killing themselves again and again in an online infrastructure that never significantly shifts.

It seems that TF2's lifespan is a spit in the face towards all the grounding core principals that modern gaming has established to determine what makes a long lasting online game stick. Especially in recent years with the whole 'live service' movement, everyone has been brainwashed into thinking that the only way a fanbase will put up for the long haul is if the game is inundated with new content every few months so that the game they play tomorrow is not the same as the one they own today. It is the philosophy of a huge sector of the industry, with entire studios now taking it as part-and-parcel that they'll have to shave off an active part of their operating structure to nobly warden over released Live Services whilst the rest of the team move on to newer shores. A genre that began being mocked as 'MMO light' in it's inception is now one of the core tenets of the industry.

But is that all a lie? I mean, Team Fortress 2 beats out the longest spawned Live Service style game ever, and that game is practically static and has been for large chunks of it's life. Sure it enjoys a few evergreen properties, from the subject of the gameplay (competitive team deathmatch never gets old) to the ageless cartoony visuals of the characters themselves. (No amount of Unreal Engine 5 power is going to render these models any better than they already are rendered.) 'Halo: Infinite' is sputtering and dying over the fact it's team can't squeeze out new comprehensive content within a 'reasonable' time frame, Overwatch, a game fashioned off of TF2 and thus sporting a similar but better realised visual style, has lost popularity so much that a proposed sequel is meeting with unimpressed scepticism following every review event. What made Team Fortress such a timeless franchise?

I think a lot of that comes from it's time and place in history, because it would be straight disingenuous to divorce nostalgia entirely from this equation. When Team Fortress 2 first launched it was at the height of Valve's popularity as a video game developer and everything they put out was destined to earn a legendary status. Remember this is a game that launched with the legendary Orange Box, a game collection that also featured 'Half Life 2: Episode Two' and 'Portal'; you could have shoved 'Ride To Hell: Retribution' into that package and it would have come away with fond well wishers all these years later. Back then Valve was the 'Rockstar' developer, the industry movers and shakers who's games were coveted by the vast majority of active gamers for the time, easily. Sure, the game industry and consumer base was a mere fraction of what it is today, but that just made it easier for a hit to bleed out of it's niche into the headlights of everyone who played games. TF2 was a legend before it ever had serious competition to fight for that title.

Which is what makes it all the sadder that after all this time, that game is dying. Remember when I hypothesised that Team Fortress 2 was overseen by an apathetic AI? Well just like another AI from popular culture, GLaDOS, this is a caretaker who has happily and uncaring watched the ecosystem and viability of Team Fortress 2 rot from the inside out with a detached professionalism and utter lack of interjection. Because you see, Team Fortress 2 isn't dying because the world has moved on from it, as is is destined one day, for sure. Team Fortress 2 is dying because it is a garden without any gardeners, with pervasive weeds that have spread and embedded themselves in every nook and cranny, sucking the life out of the expected crop and strangling the remaining community until they leave. Team Fortress 2 is another one of Valve's dirty little after thoughts.

Bots have overrun the Team Fortress 2 ecosystem with a vengeance, to a point where most people literally cannot find a game free of virtual robot players hunting around the map, killing for orders long gone cold. They fill every public lobby, litter every public match, and make it impossible for players without a big enough gang to run their own matches, to have some casual fun with the game they love. And whatsmore, although Team Fortress 2 never enjoyed the breadth of regular new content that modern Live Service's demand in order to establish themselves, it did get the odd bit of small scale updates here and there, just to let the player base know that the team still cared. Maybe it would be a new set of hats for the public to hunt for and trade with, maybe it was a thematically tipped event, and if you were exceptionally lucky it might even be a rare new character, Just enough so that the game wasn't a completely forgotten liability. Until those updates dried up.

But TF2 is a monolith in the industry, and unlike many other titles who have sunk under such pressures, this is a game with community willing to band together and fight for their game. Fans of the beloved mainstay reached out to one another across the wide maw of the internet, on Twitter, Reddit and- well, mainly just those two platforms. (They're great for that whole 'reaching out' business afterall.) And they established between themselves a peaceful protest to ask Valve to return to the game they forgot and the fans they left behind. No angry picket fences, no overly verbal diatribes into the failings of the gaming giant; just a demonstrative coming together of fans across the Internet to show everyone exactly what they're missing by letting the TF2 community be drowned in this deluge of inequity. And you know what; they actually got themselves a response!

I mean it was a pitiful and non-committal sliver of a response. Valve's lazy equivalent of 'we see your feedback'; but that's better than nothing at all! And how could they not respond when a surge of another 10 000 players logged onto the game at the same time to... just stand around in the lobby, I suppose? Nah, they could probably organise some private games between them, right? Have some fun?  Regardless, the community proved that they cared about the game and Valve can see that. "We love this game and know you do, too" says the official TF2 Twitter. "We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things." So that's... well it's lip service but that's a milestone and a half. Given that this is a game that averages about 70,000 players a month according to Steam Charts, it really is quite amazing the problem was allowed to get this bad to begin with. And if this influx of interest inspires Valve to start treating TF2 as an active franchise again, then maybe there's hope for any game out there. Maybe even for Anthem! (Hah- I'm kidding of course. Anthem will always be a lost cause.)