Gaming: Thousands Of Players Flood Into Team Fortress 2 Classified, The...

If you can find a server with empty slots, you let me know.

One of the best Team Fortress 2 mods around has been formally embraced by Steam. RED and BLU, meet GRN and YLW.

Team Fortress 2 Classified (formerly called TF2 Classic) has relaunched as an official Steam mod with its own store page and everything. The revamped TF2 Classified, now running on the official TF2 SDK that Valve released last year, is both throwback (hence its old "Classic" moniker) and additive: paring down the 19-year-old shooter to its pre-hats era while adding a select few new weapons, modes, and a whole new class.

Here's the elevator pitch, as pulled from the TF2 Classified Steam page:

Think of TF2 Classified as a fresh start, assuming you haven't already been playing it since its public debut since 2020 (or its earlier releases since 2014). It's a cleaner, simpler version of TF2 with some quality-of-life upgrades and new toys to play with. That's a fun proposition for someone like me who enjoys TF2, but was never dedicated enough to grasp all of its wild post-launch weapons.

The Steam launch is going so well that, well, playing TF2 Classified is a bit rough at the moment. Nearly 10,000 players flooded into the game as it went live, a pace that neither me nor mod team Eminoma anticipated. As of writing, both official and community servers have been crammed full for hours. If you make it onto one of the servers running the new VIP mode or 4team, stay in (or give that spot to me)!

The one time I did find a normal server, it was lovely. One of the first improvements I noticed was the redesigned loadout screen that makes it easier to swap out gear for multiple classes. As for new gear, I've mostly been messing around with that new Civilian class. He's a helpless buffoon with no weapons, but he can buff teammates with mini crits. Civilian is only really meant to be played in VIP, but it seems like it can be enabled at the server hosts' whims.

New guns are what really steal the show: I really like the Soldier's R.P.G., a harder-hitting rocket with an aggressive arc, the engineer's buildable jump pads (which totally redefine team mobility), and the Medic's Rejuvinator, a medigun replacement that trades the tether beam for a medicinal grenade launcher in the style of Overwatch's Baptiste. I do miss some of my vanilla TF2 guns, but these new guns are of such high quality that you'd believe they've always been there.

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Source: PC Gamer