Over the thousands of hours I've spent playing team shooters, Team Fortress 2 has remained so appealing to me because of its clear focus. By not taking its roster anywhere near as seriously as your Overwatches, your Rainbow Six Sieges, etc., players are allowed to fulfill their role-playing fantasies in a kind of self-parody and the result is (mostly) a community that finds a balance between competitiveness and fun goofing off. TF2 Classic is arguably better than the base game at the moment because it removes a lot of the weapon clutter, forcing each class to play their class better rather than relying on swapping in and out cheesy gimmicks.

Some of the new additions are excellent. The jump pad is the real star of the show, but plenty others feel like they're keeping in mind the role of the class and adding something that's a reasonable extension of that.

I don't like the state of melee weapons in the game, and I think how awkward medieval modes feel demonstrate what I mean. I think every class should be able to get crits if some of them are - and I don't mean random crits which still feel iffy even if they're only for melee now. Maybe they could make it so Medic can manually charge up Shock Therapy, but doing so means he's not healing.

Hopefully they'll find a way to add more good weapons and balancing in future updates, but things have been refreshingly good. My biggest hope is they add back pl_swiftwater and group dancing. Sniper is still a frustrating class. Someone on YouTube suggested making it so that the longer he charges his rifle the more visible a faint laser sight should be. That might encourage Snipers to get better at quickscoping rather than holding sightlines to get kills, while still keeping the oppressiveness of the class just without literally sending people to spawn so often.

I absolutely adore this game. As time has gone on, base TF2 has developed a whole host of issues that have slowly chipped away at my desire to come back to it, namely bots, performance issues, and neglect that ahs left the balance of most of the weapons feeling very inconsistent. TF2C has effectively fixed all of these issues for me. Though it's updated infrequently, it's limited pool of items has been very carefully balanced to make an experience that's consistently fun to engage with. The unique VIP mode and the 4 team maps are also a huge highlight. They're exceptionally refreshing experiences and I can't imagine doing without them beyond this point. I can easily see myself coming back to this game for years to come and having a wonderful time each time I do.

Been playing this casually a few weeks now and I have to say; it's like being sent back in time, but to a different time-line where Valve's focus on content was different.

TF2C is classic-lite, some QOL features from modern TF2 exist, but also so do some new weapons and game modes and while not every choice/weapon/mode sits right with me 100%, I've still been enjoying my time with it.

If you at all crave to re-visit the memory of TF2, but very specifically just before Sniper vs. Spy - then you gotta peep this.

There's a handful of "vanilla" servers that are regularly well populated.

While the development efforts for this and the balance mods hosted on it are commendable, they're usually fun for about 30 minutes, and then you have to watch as they each go through the same "Who knew!" motions every time a balance decision like having any weapon without damage fall-off blows up in their face, especially when it's on a class like Engineer, Yes, I'm sure it SOUNDS cool, but it plays like dogshit, and I'm tired of every other weapon halving TTK while also getting me sniped from across the map.

By a heavy.

A look into an alternative universe where Valve didn't fuck up the game beyond recognition with busted items that breaks the intended balance, grimey lootboxes to pry people's cash, and leaving the game in an abandoned state so bots can solve it's source code to add "xOMEGATRONICx" in random servers to mic spam earrape and frame one headshot the whole server. Basically the good ending.

Reminded me that I actually did use to love Team Fortress 2 to bits and it wasn't just stockholm syndrome and that's honestly the best kind of praise I could give it.