Team Fortress 2, Free Forever.Follow

That's right TF2 is free to play forever. No payment for software and no payment for server access. All you have to do is go visit Steam and download it and you can play it until your fingers fall off for free.

SpoilerIn before Allegory finds some reason why this is not awesome.

Edited, Jun 25th 2011 2:40pm by Turin

I bought TF2 about a year ago and haven't played it all that much. Frankly I haven't enjoyed it as much at TFC. I always loved conc maps.

Ahh, LAN Parties. Something I remember fondly and would never admit to.

I love playing sniper. I'm pretty good at it. People don't like good snipers when they get rocked jumping down, then they come and camp battlements on 2Fort to discourage me. Though usually I like to just duel other snipers rather than actually play the map correctly.

Well you know what I mean! The main objective to the map. Capture the flag briefcase. Man now I want to install TF2 on this laptop and play.

I know. I was snickering at the idea of anyone playing 2Fort "correctly."

2Fort is the well deserved butt of many jokes in the TF2 community because of its iconic status and legendary frustrating gameplay. Even today it is probably the worst official map Valve has released. @fort can be fun, but only if you don't take it seriously. Players who take it seriously quickly learn it is a beast which devours souls to perpetuate the stalemate into eternity. There about a 50% chance on any given 2fort server that people will get pissed at you for even trying to win; it's just not in the spirit of the map.

As I said, my last PvP FPS experience was Doom but I've been having a lot of fun with the game. Right now there's a HUGE influx of players since it went free so you'll likely find yourself on servers with 75% inexperienced players and a few more qualified opponents. You can also gain some experience privately by playing the "training" option where the rest of your team and the opposing team are all computer controlled.

I though getting killed would bother me more than it does. I think one thing is the cartoonish nature of the characters keeps me from getting too invested (in a good way) and, if you're just getting assigned random games, you don't really have a lot of stats to worry about (# of times killed, winds, etc). From what I gather, specific servers can keep those details but if you just hit "Play a Game" and let it auto-assign you, no worries. Finally, despite my noobness, I still manage to feel effective more often than not. I assume that's a quality of the game itself as it sure isn't my awesome skill.

Also, thankfully, I've noticed mercifully little of the "WTF u sux, n00b", "LOL ur moms a ***** ***", "eat kokk tard" stuff I was half-expecting both via text and via voice. Once I was on a server with a few trash talking idiots named stuff like "HeilHitler" but that was literally one game out of probably near a hundred so far.

Edited, Jun 28th 2011 5:44pm by Jophiel

Team chat default is "t" I believe, or "y" I forget.

It might be "u" then. I forget, I'm pretty sure they are close to each other.

I'm downloading TF2 on this computer. If you guys ever get together and play let me know.

I've kind of been more fond of TFC. I'm still getting used to the really animated part of TF2 along with these new weapons and things.

"u" should be for team chat, "y" for general chat, and "v" for voice chat by default. If this doesn't appear to be the case for you then you can go to options and keyboard/control setting to change it. "t" is to spray your logo if you have one.

There are three option I recommend you turn on ( I don't believe they are default) that will make your TF2 life much easier. To reach all of these use the advanced options icon in the lower right (or go to options and then to multiplayer).

1. Under "Combat" options make sure to turn on automatic reloading. This makes your character automatically reload their weapon whenever you aren't shooting and it isn't full. There is no downside to this and it saves you the embarrassment of hooking up with a sexy enemy combatant only to find yourself shooting blanks.

2. Under "class specific" options turn on the medic option that makes the medigun continue to heal without the mouse button being pressed. If you ever play medic, this will prevent your index finger to permanently locking into a hook like configuration.

3. At the very bottom there is an option related to training. By default I believe it is set to allow everyone to trade with you. The last time I played TF2 was over 6 months ago and they didn't have trading. I hopped into a game only to find myself pestered with trade requests from people who weren't even on the server. Unless you're really enthusiastic about trading you may want to change this option to "friends only." This is probably more relevant to me since I have a bunch of cool **** you guys don't.

I've never gotten a trade request but I did play a map last night where one guy did nothing besides yell "DOES ANYONE HAVE AN AXETINGUISHER??" every 90 seconds.

Yes, it was in all caps too. In case we missed it. I wasn't able to help him out though since my Pyro runs with a garden rake (Back scratcher).