Hi! Yeah, this is weird for us too. After an exhausting year of porting, which followed an exhausting half-decade of legal uncertainty, Team Fortress 2 Classified is now available on Steam! (Steam is a gaming storefront that's kind of dark-blue, like this page is!)
But suppose you haven't heard of us before, or read our About page, or visited our Wiki, or Googled us, or read the nonsense AI summary that pops up when you Google us. Suppose you learned to read two sentences ago. What is Team Fortress 2 Classified? In short, it's a reimagining of Team Fortress 2, sent back to its release era and then built outwards again with original and restored content. In long, it's got all this in it:
...or Orson Jenkins, as he's known to his employees and debt collectors. Based on the legacy Team Fortress character, the Civilian is a fully-featured special class, complete with his own equipment and voice work. He's playable in games of VIP and VIP Race, waddling urgently to the Escape Zone on a suite of made-in-house maps.
Team Fortress 2 Classified includes special four-team matches, featuring the citrusy colors of Global Radio Network (GRN) and Yard Logistics Workers (YLW). The addition of two extra teams lends a sense of frantic outnumbered mania to select games of Arena, King of the Hill, Domination, and more, provided you're on a map that supports it.
Players have access to 21 new weapons and tools (and counting!) across all 10 classes—nail guns, landmine launchers, lengths of chain, sleep darts, and jump pads, to name a few. Some are homages to long-lost concepts from Team Fortress 2's pre-release, but all were designed from scratch to feel right at home and open up new avenues of gameplay.
The textures, models, particles, and shaders used in Classified are upgraded nearly across the board. This includes consistency changes (like first-person hands matching world models), HD player textures, new gibs, and restored toon-style shading that was absent at Team Fortress 2's release. Many menus are also re-styled to look more distinctly TF2.
Players can freely modify their game client and install mods, without fear of losing access to official servers. (If they think they're so smart...) Also, with new tools for server hosts, community servers can mount custom weapon packs, support advanced custom maps, and make drastic changes to game rules.
To coin a phrase: Team Fortress 2 Classified is constantly updated. Dozens of active developers, from programmers to modelers to music composers to particle editors to Steam announcement writers, contribute to full-sized updates—and now, they won't have to push through scary command-line installers to get them out to players.
Like good wine (and unlike the Civilian's hairline), some things do improve with age. Avanti is a legacy Attack/Defense map from Team Fortress Classic, totally revamped for VIP mode some 26 years after its first debut. Once set in a picturesque Italian hamlet, it's been reimagined as a Napa Valley winery, where every glass of red carries piquant notes of San Francisco smog.
To reach the safety of his illegally parked car, the Civilian will need to pass through the winery's tasting parlor, its fermentation plant, and a stuck-in-the-past visitor center—all connected by narrow European-style alleys with ample opportunity for RED to box him in. Uncork a bottle of Chateau Jeanquins 1959 "Whoop-Ass", and make the streets flow with red stuff again.
In the world of big business, a billionaire without a secret mountaintop research outpost is hardly a billionaire at all. But, as a less-underpaid secretarial staff might have noticed sooner, this mountain's not big enough for two Civilians, and the only way to get out and buy a different mountain is to stage a daring escape by air.
Nothing bad has ever happened to a rich person in a helicopter, famously, but this old adage is about to be put to the test. Usher your Civilian through this mountain base and to the waiting evac chopper on the enemy helipad, and prove you can be trusted on one of the only VIP maps with a death pit.
Sisyphus (named after the Greek god of Payload Race) is GRN and YLW's entry gig into the bomb-pushing business. Four teams, and four carts, are in a mad crowded race to blow up an underground data center, and the colossal mercenary-shredding fan that cools its servers down with cold air from the center of the earth.
Unlike the mythic Sisyphus, your pointless toil won't even come with peace and quiet. Sisyphus's circular, almost clock-like layout has teams spilling into each other's bases almost by accident, and the winding cart route through the quarry will give each team its own individual chance to knock you back downhill.
The in-game HUD has been remade with scalable vector icons, which suit modern resolutions much better, and the chat menu and scoreboard no longer have that bare-bones Source look. Players will also get more information when aiming at another player—for example, Medics can see their patient's held weapon and reserve ammo, and Spies can see what building an Engineer is carrying.
The server browser and options menu are now bright, legible, screen-filling interfaces, with a clear hierarchy of information. Servers will have a thumbnail screenshot of the map they're running, and players will no longer have to drag around ugly spreadsheet columns or open extra windows to see key information like a server's tags or player list.
Subtle immersive audio cues have been added for when damage is dealt or received. Unlike hit sounds, these give more specific info: different damage sources and statuses have different audio feedback (damage dealt by afterburn or bleed sound different than direct gunshots, for example), and Engineers can hear when their buildings take damage. (Fully configurable in Options!)
We've carried over Team Fortress 2's Offline Practice training mode, where new players can learn the basics in singleplayer bot matches. Our version includes select VIP, VIP Race, and Domination maps, and plugs some TF2C-exclusive maps into the other practice gamemodes. Newcomers can even numb themselves to four-team with some rounds on Frigid, Flask, or a balkanized version of Hydro.
General Changes:
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Gameplay Changes:
UI Changes:
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Custom Weapon Changes:
Inherited From Live TF2:
Misc:
© EMINOMA. Valve, the Valve logo, Steam, the Steam logo, Team Fortress, and the Team Fortress logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Valve Corporation. Team Fortress 2 Classified is a fan creation and is not affiliated with Valve Corporation.