Team Fortress 2 Update Today, Scout Update Soon

Valve’s Team Fortress 2 team is putting the finishing touches on an update for the Scout class, and are paving the way with a couple of smaller updates arriving today and later this week.

Slaphappy TF2 players who crave speed, scatterguns and dispensers, your moment is coming soon. After releasing updates for the Pyro, Heavy and Medic, Valve will be releasing a new class pack for the Scout in the very near future. “We’re just about done with the Scout pack, and our design and coding has already moved on to the next pack,” Valve’s Robin Walker wrote on the TF2 blog. “The weapons and achievements are all nailed down, and we just have to finish up the final artwork on them.”

The update will come soon after a couple of smaller-scale updates that will be released over the course of the week. The one that hits today will fix bugs and exploits, while another one scheduled for later this week will move your inventory of unlockable items onto the Steam Cloud, a centralized storage hub that holds player data and saves. So if you play on more than one PC, you can have the same loadout for your weapons on all computers. “Once that’s out of the way, we’ll be able to ship the Scout pack,” Walker said.

Tuning the class for new content hasn’t been easy for Valve, according to Walker. Coming up with a suitable new alternative weapon to the Scout’s Scattergun was a bit tricky. “Balancing his replacement weapon has been very tricky due to large threat difference of the Scout between skilled and non-skilled hands,” Walker said. “More on that soon.” It’s true – Scouts are absolutely devilish in the hands of skilled players, but don’t have much punch if you don’t know the class well enough. Will the new weapon bridge the gap and make the Scout more accessible for everyone?

Walker also addressed a number of pressing fan concerns regarding the state of the game. Asked “why is the Sniper such a fake Australian?” he replied: “Yes, it’s true, the Sniper is a fairly unconvincing Australian. Most of his lines make him sound more English than Australian, and the voice actor is clearly an English actor faking an Australian accent. As for why we didn’t fight to make him more authentic, we thought it was appropriate that he was about as convincing an Australian as the Demoman is a Scotsman, or the Medic a German.”