[This is not necessarily going to be a review of Team Fortress 2 but instead a scattered collection of thoughts and notes I have about Valve as a whole and the current second run of the #savetf2 movement. "Scattered" is an understatement for the record, I have brain damage and severe mental illness so this might end up being formatted like a letter by Francis E. Dec, minus the racism. I started writing this on the 6th June, 2024 and finished on June 10th; I do not have a crystal ball so I really have no idea what the twists and turns of the current fiasco with this game will pan out like the second after I hit publish.

This "review" also has mentions of CSAM, as it's an open secret it's being distributed in Team Fortress 2. Reader discretion is advised]

I pivoted to an anti-Valve stance late last year and unfortunately I am vindicated.

The internet will tell you Valve is one of the greatest developers of all time, but I... disagree. Valve have a history of constantly acquiring and taking credit for really cool mods made by other people and then releasing them as unfinished sequels, which often have little seeds of design or monetization schemes that then go on to do irreparable damage to the industry. Whilst Half-Life's sometimes negative influence on game design to push setpieces is overshadowed by how damn good it is as a debut title, their multiplayer efforts, done with the assistance of marxist economists(???) and psychologists, are all designed to shake up the industry for the worse. What I think is really crazy about that is that their fanbase --a nightmare trinity of tiktok skibidi toilet zoomers, redditors, and elon musk stans-- will then do a gaslighting campaign and pretend another company did it. They have produced some bangers, Portal is in my top 4, but the quality of their titles does not do nearly enough for me to offset the harm they've done to video games as a medium.

Steam was made to push always online DRM and not owning your games. This rendered Half-Life 2 unplayable for many because why the fuck would you ever pull that stunt on 2004 internet. You can have games removed from your library at any time, you don't own anything not even your account which is why you can't include it in your will. It's only because it was introduced so early that it's been able to be updated into a sometimes functional piece of software and has become normalized and built a weird products cult despite being just as broken and shitty and evil as Uplay or Origin or GFWL or Epic Games Store. By the way, people in 2004 warned that the future was going to be full of Steam imitators.

I find it interesting then that when that one Ubisoft executive stated that "we should get comfortable not owning games" there was such a huge backlash. Not just at the very obvious elements that make this such a crass and gross statement to make, especially when The Crew's execution date was days away, and antithetical to games as an art form, but because Valve already boiled that frog two decades ago with Ubisoft following shortly afterwards with UPlay, an always online DRM launcher with an explicit anti-game-ownership stance that launched with a blockbuster title many couldn't play. Some of that backlash, bafflingly, suggested that this is why Steam is a better service, because you do own the games, which is incorrect. It's not the first time this happened as we'll get into later.

In 2007 Valve launched Team Fortress 2 bundled with The Orange Box, which was a good call since it spent 9 years in development as Valve and Robin Walker misunderstood what was the appeal of a class based Quake team deathmatch and yet still came out in a state some considered underbaked with a wimpy amount of maps and gamemodes.

This is where one of Valves biggest industry-damaging moves was born; TF2 was what we now refer to as a "live service game", a game intended to be expanded upon further in the long run with free updates and additions to the game. I don't think I need to elaborate on how the concept became a trend and made game development unsustainable and resulted in many developers making a game they didn't want or have the experience to make, rushing in an endless stream of unfinished games that have to post an apology jpeg and a roadmap for the future that often never comes. If you got burned playing vanilla Destiny or vanilla Destiny 2 or Anthem or The Avengers or Suicide Squad, that all started with Valve. Thank you so much.

Valve did seem to have a good thing going but over the years development started slowing down, which is a product of their policy of putting all desks on wheels and just letting you quit a project whenever you like. Fan updates went from cute little photoshop and HTML experiments (remember the Guard Dog class update?) to being insular with the game's updates because there were so few people interested in working on hats who wanted to instead work on Half-Life 3 concepts that'd last for three months at a time.

Speaking of hats let's talk about TF2's second biggest innovation that destroyed the gaming industry: Lootboxes! I don't think these need explanation, but maybe all lootboxes are banned forever when you read this so here goes. These are digital boxes that will unlock one random rare item out of a list that require a digital key to open. Keys cost real money and since the odds of getting what you want are so low you run the risk of buying tonnes of keys and become a gambling addict overnight. Valve were one of the first to introduce these in a big budget game with TF2 in 2010, and pushed it as their way of making money when it became a F2P game.

Unboxing crates is a 10 second process but actually what you get is decided behind the scenes in a millisecond. It's just picking an item ID, they sell the anticipation with the fake wait and the sound effects. They then continued this trend with CS:GO/CS2, which took the imaginary slot machine imagery and made it explicit [by making it a fucking roulette wheel.]([https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0aKQXLhEL1o/maxresdefault.jpg)

Lootboxes are a now unanimously reviled scheme, mostly after the release of Star Wars Battlefront 2, whose slot machine aesthetic, intentional balance issues and gating off of Darth Vader was rightfully seen as cynical for a game children would play. What seemed like the hot new way to get rich quick has been responded to with partial bans in the EU and threats of investigation and litigation elsewhere, relegated to shitty sports games. It even became a well received marketing tactic, even by EA who got themselves in this pickle to begin with, to state your game would have no lootboxes.

But, wait a minute. There's a 5-7 year gap between Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO's lootboxes and Battlefront 2. Doesn't TF2 and CS:GO use heavy slot machine aesthetics also? Doesn't TF2 have balance issues that are remedied by the buying of lootboxes? Wasn't TF2 F2P and CS:GO was often on sale for $5 with only $4 needed to buy a key, and Battlefront 2 was $60, making it the easier games for kids to spend money on and get addicted to gambling? Hasn't Valves economy opened up the door to literal casinos built off of TF2 and CS:GO's economy that are tightly integrated with the games community, with some sites [trying to sabotage each others major sponsored tournaments based on who lets children gamble on them the most?]([https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/1br0eze/pgl_major_interrupted_after_people_storm_stage/])

These are all good questions! Unfortunately until this month you've never been allowed to ask them! Like, seriously, this company has been immune to almost any possible criticism of the way they operate because Portal was funny and if you said too many mean things we'd never get Half-Life 3! D: People Make Games can't even make a video about ex-valve employees talking about how it sucks to work there and how the libertarian culture just leads to projects never getting off the ground and EpicFashWarrior1488: The Game being a $100 fee away from sharing shelf space with The Last of Us without getting thousands of thumbs down votes on YouTube. There is a level of fanaticism about this company that I have never seen even from peak Blizzard fans or Nintendo fans. If you were like me and were on the internet between the release of the orange box until about 2018, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The sudden negative tide turn on Valves 26-year long reputation is two-fold, one is the leak of Deadlock, a spinoff of DOTA 2 --the third spinoff released in just 6 years, with the previous two, Artifact and Underlords, being abandoned in less than a year-- that just looks like absolute shit and not the game they need to make when their other live services are in such poor health, and the other has been a 5 year long campaign of neglect by Valve that has rendered TF2 largely unplayable and will probably remain that way for the rest of time.

When you break down what's actually happened you realize most of the problems with whats gone on in the last half decade with Team Fortress 2 are entirely self-inflicted; the bad actors don't help but this game is dying because of all the design decisions Valve made coming home to roost. Fitting they made a game synonymous with cake because what's happened cannot be unbaked out of the game and economy design. Examples of such include:

- Valve's "flat" structure encouraging people to simply quit projects whenever they like and having to convince people to join them on work. Zero (0!) people are working on TF2 and apparently nobody wants to even touch it.

- Valve's libertarian approach to content moderation allowing Neo-nazis to safely operate in its communities, which is bad as is, but especially so now that the new Neo-nazi trend to "shock people" is to expose them to child sexual abuse. Numerous Steam threads have been made complaining that players with The Conscientious Objector, a sign that you can upload any image on your computer onto and hit people with it, have put CSAM on it. Someone has already gone to prison because of this --and not because Valve did anything about it, because that would be responsible of them and maybe would dispel the libertarian allegations, but instead because he was looking at the material in a library-- and in a level of actually criminal incompetence, the Source Engine downloads all sprays and custom item images onto your computer.

Valve actually had to break their ignorance of the games state to put up an emergency patch that wiped the sprays folder every time you boot up, but due to the nature of computer storage if you played TF2 in the last couple of years there is a chance you have traces of child abuse on your computer. I need to fucking say it again: The internet had a fake social contract that forbid you to ever criticize a company whose games had a random chance of DOWNLOADING CHILD ABUSE onto your computer. Can you imagine this sort of story breaking out about any other developer? Actually it would be easy, because the story would actually break out and not be suppressed by everyone to Uncle Dane to Jason Schrier to Preserve The Legacy.

- TF2's economy actively encouraging the use of bots that can eventually fund themselves whilst putting pennies in Valves pocket. TF2's defenders have often stated its high player count is proof there's a game to support. This narrative was shattered a not too long ago this year when it was revealed [https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ](more than 70% of the player base isn't actually real.) It's bots who can run the game in a command window and idle mass amounts of lootboxes-- supposedly up to 2 million a year-- and sell them off for profit. This also doesn't include the giftapult, which is an item that lets you send a random item into a random players inventory, which now very likely goes to one of these bots which can then circulate those items for profit.

This has been the prelude to the events that have led to the intermittent #saveTF2 hashtag campaign. For the past 4 years if you join the game using matchmaking, which they actively push on you, you will have a 100% guarantee of joining a server mostly comprised of spinbots. These spinbots, besides being able to headshot you and kill you instantly with lock-on precision, also are able to push vote kicks on innocent players all whilst mic-spamming either obnoxious music or white supremacist/homophobic/transphobic screeds. Valves band-aid solution to this was to prevent F2P players from using voice or text communication, which actually made the game worse to play since calling for a medic, an essential function of the game that keeps you in the fight and allows your team to succeed, was no longer possible. It also didn't work since the bot hosts can easily afford to upgrade these bots to premium since they also sell scam "bot immunity" packages that the community actually bought in droves. Oops!

TF2's community allowed this problem to fester for two years because they had a server browser to skip matchmaking and enter more moderated fan-hosted community servers. This delayed response is, frankly, unforgivable; I don't want to say the TF2 community got what it deserved but all I'll say is such a slack, delayed realization that this is wrong should not have you shocked when the situation gets so much more fucked up and worse. And it has gotten worse. People who've tried to investigate whose hosting these bots have been doxed, swatted, their voices turned into AI to smear them aa pedophilea and converted into nazi copypastas to micspam. There is a degree of criminality here going on but as we've established, this is nothing new.

Imagine if you booted up Call of Duty: Warzone and 90 of the 100 players were spinbots using proximity and text chat to recite FBI crime statistics. Imagine if thinking this is fucked up and looking into it got your life ruined. This would be a huge news story and action would probably be taken in a week. And with the successful lawsuits by Bungie setting a precedent for actively going after the cheat makers source of income, the hosts would probably get ground up into dust in a courtroom. Valve doesn't care. They know cheaters in CSGO are also big spenders. They'll come back; making the game less fun to play is a small price for pumping the fake economy.

When the TF2 community realized the fire was only getting bigger, there was a push on social media to raise awareness of the problem with #SaveTF2. Valve broke from their famous silent approach and did actually respond. Once. With a "we hear you!" tweet. This has never been followed up by Valve themselves, instead pushing yet another fan-made seasonal update and giving limited code access to an outsourced developer who, whilst they made the game much more stable and opened up the door to ambitious new custom maps and even game modes, was never allowed to make the small but essential change the anti-cheat to fix this problem overnight. Understandable for backdoor reasons, but the outsource developer is also the guy who worked on Proton, which is the reason the Steam Deck can actually play a lot of AAA games and not just be a Hades machine that costs twice as much as a Nintendo Switch, so it just seems extremely disrespectful that's how they view him whilst making mad bank off of his work to improve Linux as a whole.

The fans waited another two years. Once again the bot problem mutated and the hosts of those bots started engaging in what some might uncharitably describe as terrorism. They have finally had enough. #SaveTF2 has been mobilized into action yet again, and Team Fortress 2 broke history as the first Valve game to get a negative rating on steam, overwhelmingly negative, in fact.

I'd hate to be a cynic in this extremely long half star review about how much Valve sucks and allowed neo-nazis to engage in the proliferation of CSAM to unsuspecting strangers, but I don't think this'll pan out the way the fans hope to. Maybe things would be different if there was outcry from the first week of the bot problem, and not when it takes so long to complain that from the outside it just looks like you accepted it as The New Normal.

Just join Danetopia, kill Philip, grab mum, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.

Sandwiched between the infamous Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott, where complaints of a sequel happening only 7 months after the first games release ended with everyone involved buying L4D2, and the SaveTF2 movement, is the one time Valve actually relented due to the community; in 2015, in partnership with Bethesda, they released paid mods for Skyrim. This scheme allowed creators to agree to be paid in peanuts (only $100 of the revenue after they make Valve and Bethesda $400) to turn their hobby work into microtransaction slop, the horse armor for the next generation. Bethesda stated that the mod base was extremely small and that moving to a paid marketplace would make people want to play with mods more... by going against the decade-long grain of Elder Scrolls mods being free. You can probably think of a few problems with this and why this scheme needed to die fast.

What followed was the libertarian wild west of stolen horse vagina models, plagiarism, and troll mods, and Bethesdas engine allows for the easy piracy of these mods anyway. The whole thing lasted for only a week thanks to outcry from the moment it was released. Not two years later, TF2 fans, minute one. Part of that reversal was probably to do with the risk of mods being full of copyright infringement since they're often made by teenagers who didn't need to worry about that kind of thing before, but the point is that early and effective outcry actually stopped Valve from doing yet another industry destroying move.

I don't think lightning is ever going to strike twice again, though. Nobody wants to work on this damn game but there's also more to lose from shutting it down than to leave it in this zombie state, as kid gamblers who stay on those community servers think it's still okay to financially reward this awful dogshit company with money by buying hats and keys. There was a push by games media to report on this problem to no avail. Tyler Mcvicker sabotaged the movement by encouraging people to personally email random Valve staff. Valve are famously aloof and we even have a term invented by Redditors for when Valve doesn't keep up with promises, "Valve Time". There's even a huge list of Valve Time incidents on the Valve maintained developer wiki. That's why the fans waited four years for a fix, that times are rough now but all you have to do is push through that Valve Time wait and you will see a miracle happen.

In my house, we call "Valve time" by a different name; lying repeatedly.

This is the longest and most incoherent thing I have ever wrote that isn't a worldbuilding document. If you're hoping for a conclusion, you probably aren't going to find this satisfactory sorry lol. I guess my driving force behind this ""review"" is the strange and disastrous relationship this company has with the internet.

There is a growing realization that corporations are not our friends and will fuck us in the ass in the end. That being said, there have been three companies who managed to convince the gaming community otherwise. Two of them have shown their true colors. Blizzard upset people with less refined releases and that shite with the Hearthstone stream, and then gave people not interested in CIA narratives a valid reason to despise them when they were later outed for being so misogynistic it killed someone. CD Projekt Red had a successful apology tour for The Witcher 2's DRM by launching GoG and then released The Witcher 3 by saying all the right "pro consumer things" before torching that 5 year streak of unprecedented good will by turning development Cyberpunk 2077 into a sweatshop as developers were forced to push the game out over three years too early so Microsoft could sell a themed Xbox One that couldn't run the game. I feel the reaper is knocking on Valves door, and thank fuck. Gaming will be a much better place when we shatter this facade.

I guess, ultimately, I just want to live in a world where the reaction to valve worship memes like this to invoke the same disgusted laughter a meme worshiping Elon Musk before his arm got permanently cocked in the Sieg Heil does.

Fuck this company.

A game so fucking awful it made every other game in the genre unpalatable to me (except Fallout 76 for some reason). The games claim to fame is that it has meters for quite literally everything involving the human body and it turns out there's a good reason over-designed byzantine bullshit in games isn't more common. If you care about that sort of thing go to medical school, at least then you'll get paid handsomely for your effort and won't have to carefully manage the fingerless glove meter.

I played this with a friend years ago and I said out loud "I am not having fun" multiple times. I cannot think of a bigger mark.

Ubisoft is a right wing company.

Yeah, sure, they use women and gays in their marketing but you have to understand that it's all in the same way republicans have started to use them; as gizmos from a toybox of image. And the thing about toyboxes is that you'll grow old of them and throw them away.

Otherwise, from Serge Hascoët yelling out "There's a monkey on the screen!" when he first saw the trailer to The Force Awakens, to Tom Clancy's The Division where the first third of the game is curiously about shooting black men who deal extra melee damage, to Far Cry 5's inexplicable "hey maybe the christofascist child groomer cult had a point about forever wars" end, to Tom Clancy's Elite Squad honest to god "George Soros Funds BLM to destroy the west" conspiracy plot that they had to patch out to be less fascist because it launched only a week after George Floyd's death, to hiring people who post "rapefugee" and "holohoax" memes (this is a personal anecdote and unfortunately considering their lax attitudes to sex crimes I don't have faith in Ubisofts HR team to respond to it), the company is just straight up Hitler.

If you think they are woke you are morbidly incorrect. In fact, they're on your side! Have fun reconciling with that the next time you repost a /v/ greentext about how Red Dead 2 is shit because Arthur Morgan doesn't have a dedicated lynching button or whatever. For everyone else, particularly on this site that tends to lean left, that might be your cue to stop buying their games.

So how about the game?

I played a few hours, it sucks. It's the same Far Cry 3 you already played except now its several magnitudes more annoying. I was on board with the idea of an urban far cry after 9 years of forests and rural areas, maybe make a more consistently fun version of Homefront: The Revolution, but the game is quick to turn around and say, "Fuck you! You're stuck on the mmo tutorial island you dumb fuck! Enjoy your destiny hub and questgivers asshole! Eat shit! Slop is my politics, slop is my life!"

Wow, thanks. I'm never leaving the island and I'll keep that in mind when I review your game on backloggd dot com.

I'm sure you can find a breakdown of the politics of this game but it's funny how thin the illusion is this time. They had to put out a statement that their game about DIY imperialism has no bearing on reality. Cuba is just a mass hallucination, deary. Oh whats that, Cuba, which we established doesn't exist, has a lung cancer vaccine that the US forbids you from trying to get? Well... uhh.... it turns out the vaccine gives you more cancer, because its made out of tobacco or some shit. You know how the cubans love their cigars? quick throw in a few more words the gringos won't understand in the middle of the dialogue. (That's me, by the way! I'm the gringos!)

I feel like Phil Lord has 200 hours in this game. Actually, let's put that to the test: can someone ask him for his playtime in Far Cry 6? I checked and he not once tweeted about the game.

Is there a positive? Sure, but its not even related to the game-- Xcloud runs really well! I put it on a steam deck and minus some oversteering when im aiming its largely playable...

...You should play a better game on it though.

It's bad!

I am Almir DESTROYER OF PAYDAY 2, please buy my new game Payda-
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It's Payday 2 but now it looks like an early PS4 game. Come back in 5 years when one of two things happen: either the game gets good, or Overkill's wikipedia page will be written in past tense.

A really good idea worn down by poor execution. When it works, it works, but that is not the wavelength it's operating at most of the time.

-First of all, wow, this is a game that needed a Valve-style clipping pass. This game already takes every available opportunity to kill your momentum so having small objects that block your movement really does not help. I unofficially threw in the towel when Faith decided to clip between a barrel and a railing and was stuck there until I reset the game.
-The level design is not as great as everyone makes it out to be. I cannot think of a more dumber way to lay out your levels after making a movement system that greatly punishes moving your camera sharply than a game comprised largely of sharp turns and areas where you need to use the 180 button to find the next ledge.
-This would be forgivable if it wasn't for the fact the game also wants to put you under pressure and send the armed police after you. The moments where you have minimal resistance and can just make your own route are fantastic; you don't need to make this a shooter or even to have enemies tbh. Just trying to avoid hearing that scary "falling to your death" sound is good motivator to not screw up.
-The shooting is bad!
-Looking around whilst grabbing onto ledges is too slow. climbing up ladders is too slow. climbing pipes is too slow. the slide is too slow. crawling through vents is too slow. Turning that valve is too slow. I'm getting shot at, move your ass!
-A lot of the movement feels scripted and you have less room to play about with the levels than you think. If Faith cannot complete a vertical wall run by grabbing onto a ledge, there's a good chance the animation won't even play at all. Railings will either be a springboard or it won't. They built a free-running game where level entities limit what you can do. Lame!
-Mirrors Edge deserves all the praise it gets for its visuals; good high frequency texture detail and an innovative approach to baked lighting have helped this game age better than almost everything else that came out the same year. However, I would actually avoid playing the game on an OLED display if you can. Even on the lowest brightness and contrast settings this game's bloom and exposure create a legitimately painful experience.
-Soundtracks nice :)

Overall a very disappointing return to a game I last tried when I was like 16.