After almost a year of absence, Team Fortress 2 mods TF2 Classic and Open Fortress are available for download again

The player count of Team Fortress 2 has been on a steady decline over the past decade. It used to top the list of games with the most concurrent traffic on Steam ten years ago, but presently, it barely manages to break into the top ten on a good day.

This, however, is not the case with other Valve-made games like Dota 2 or other multiplayer staples that frequent the most-played games chart. While their player count also undergoes turbulence, none compare to the flatlining of Team Fortress 2 traffic. That said, through thick and thin, Team Fortress 2 has had a smaller but steady following, which can now be termed a niche community.

Thankfully, while Valve switches Team Fortress 2 to minimal-life-support mode, fan projects surrounding the game have done much more to keep it alive. And as of the present, both TF2 Classic and Open Fortress are online and available to download.

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Why Team Fortress 2 modding scene is important

The DNA of Team Fortress 2 itself goes back to mods and community projects. Like Valve's other game, Dota 2, which was based on a Warcraft 3 mod, the first Team Fortress was a Quake mod.

In its heyday, TF2 was deemed one of the most exhilarating multiplayer arena-shooter experiences out there. Now, if anything, the game is the most unplayable out of the Valve triad (CS:GO, Dota 2, and TF2). The main issue here is associated with bots. More specifically, player-made custom bots with the express intent of populating the game session.

The source code for the game went public years ago, so it is relatively simple to populate the server with bots that spam a random noise-maker, vote-kick actual players, and auto-lock to targets.

Both the casual and competitive modes are bogged down with numerous bots and cheaters to varying degrees. So much so that a player has to invest in a secure community server just to enjoy a regular TF2 experience.

The bots crisis does not appear to be a priority target for Valve, nor might they have the proper tools at the ready to deal with it. An even more telling factor that indicates Valve's borderline abandonment of the game is the content draught. There has been no substantial update for TF2 in years. All that players get are some holiday-specific changes, like Halloween-themed cosmetics.

The economy of cosmetics is also a mess where one key takes over 50 refined materials to make these days, instead of the one-three refined materials it used to take during the golden era of the game.

Thankfully, community mods are the saviors of the TF2 lifeline. They manage to keep the game alive by releasing regular content in Valve's stead while also getting rid of engine-level problems, unscathed by the bot crisis.

Currently, the two major candidates at play are Open Fortress and Team Fortress 2 Classic (TF2c). Both of these projects were unfortunately suspended by Valve last September on account of mods using leaked proprietary beta codes from 2008.

It should be noted that both Team Fortress 2 Classic and Open Fortress are forks of the same mod project, albeit with their own development goals. Thus, the shared codebase meant a suspension of public availability for both mods at the time.

Valve, as well as the social media handles for both projects, did specify that this indefinite suspension was only a temporary stall till those involved solved the copyright issue.

The teams continued to work on their respective projects behind the scenes, and both finally went back online yesterday.