Image: Valve
Team Fortress 2 is basically a battle royale game now, despite Valve’s wishes.
Team Fortress 2, the 16-year-old multiplayer shooter, has just received a new update to bump up its maximum player count from 32 to 100. That’s more than three times the game’s previous player count cap, but Valve warns that a full 100-player Team Fortress 2 game, “is unsupported and not recommended.”
Of course, that warning did nothing to stop Team Fortress 2 players from doing it anyway. The update doesn’t include the release of any new 100-player modes or maps, but it does allow players with custom servers to tweak their settings and allow up to 100 players to flood their matches. In case you’re wondering what that looks like, surprise, surprise - it’s chaos:
Valve did warn players that 100-player Team Fortress 2 servers could only be done at their, “own risk,” and the very concept is, “not recommended,” by the company, and it’s easy to see why. Team Fortress 2 is an old game that wasn’t built for 50-player matches, let alone 100. Joining servers that take advantage of the new player count limit will result in games that suffer from tremendous amounts of lag, poor framerate, buggy gameplay and in the worst cases, outright crashing.
On Valve’s side, not a whole lot was done to fix the game up in preparation for 100-player matches, but there is only so much you can do for a minor update to a 16-year-old game. At this point, Team Fortress 2 is facing worse problems with rampant bots and cheaters plaguing the game, so 100 players bringing a game crashing down by hosting a dance party? That’s hardly an issue at all.
It does warm the heart to see people finding new ways to enjoy Team Fortress 2 all these years later, even beyond Valve’s occasional content updates for the game. Today’s update delivers a bunch of fixes for the Versus Saxton Hale mode and other tweaks to the game, and you can read the patch notes for these changes here. It’s a good time to try out Valve’s multiplayer shooter, as it recently peaked with more than 250,000 concurrent players earlier this month thanks to a recent summer-themed update.