Team Fortress 2 Updates Incoming

While they won't be on the same scale as other major update rollouts, Valve is will soon tweak two classes in its smash hit Team Fortress 2.

Since mid-June, Valve has regularly updated its Team Fortress 2 development blog to keep gamers in the loop on what to expect for changes, updates, and new features. On Wednesday, a new post was made outlining some upcoming changes as well as announcing some rather large ones for the future.

The first slew of updates to the smash-hit are minor and focus primarily on the Engineer’s loadout. When implemented, The Engineer's Teleporter and Dispenser will both be upgradable to level 3. In laymen’s terms, the Teleporter will recharge faster, and the Dispenser will replenish health, ammo and metal faster.

Additionally, the spy will receive an update that may prove to be a game changer. Now, whenever a spy runs over a dropped weapon, his Cloak meter will replenish, allowing him to go "out into the field" for greater lengths of time. One update that every class will receive is an addition to the HUD. Now, players can see how many of their own deaths were caused by critical hits. They will also be able to see when teammates are "overcharged," and Medics will now see even more information on a teammate who is calling for medical assistance, presumably their exact health amount and where they are on the map.

According to Valve’s Robin Walker, the updates "Are just to work on some class balance and depth issues that we’ve seen in the wild with these two classes, but aren’t meant to replace their entire class packs." Also, these affected classes will see more updates further down the line.

These changes are noticeable, but not on Valve’s typical update scale. Another round of major updates is coming at some point in the near future. The Scout is the next class that will receive a new weapons loadout. Typically, every major update to Team Fortress 2 sees one Class receive a new interchangeable weapon set, along with some new class-specific achievements, new maps and some sort of comical movie clip.

The last round of updates saw the Heavy receive a new gun, boxing gloves, and a "Sandvich" that gave him half health automatically. It also introduced the maps "Steel" and "Badwater Basin," a new game mode called Arena Mode, and two movies centered around the Heavy. What many fans of TF2 enjoy about the updates is that Valve includes popular user-made maps in the updates alongside their own additional maps. This certainly adds some flavor and showcases what the community can do to keep the game interesting.

Valve also acknowledged that it would be introducing several graphical updates to Team Fortress 2, all of which derive from the newly-released Left 4 Dead. Expect to see enhanced multicore support along with other tweaks.