Team Fortress 2’s summer update is here, ushering in “major changes”, including 10 new community-created maps, the summer 2025 Cosmetic Case – which contains 23 new community-contributed items – four new community-contributed taunts, and 14 new – say it with me – community-created Unusual effects.
All cosmetic and taunt cases will grant summer 2025 Unusual effects instead of the normal ones until the event ends on 15th September.
Perhaps more surprisingly still, there’s a modest number of bug fixes and general tweaks included in the patch, too. This includes some outdated in-game tips, balance changes – including a 30 percent boost to the damage done by mini-sentries – and a fix for dead players being flagged as AFK for “idling during long rounds”. Hale, in particular, has had a number of bugs addressed.
For the full list of what’s news, head on over to Steam.
Team Fortress 2 beat its own concurrent user record in July 2023, clocking up 258,997 players even though it was, at the time, 17 years old (and is now almost old enough to order a pint in the UK). Since then, Valve handed over the game’s full client and server code to fans, encouraging them to “change, extend or rewrite” TF2 in any non-commercial way possible. For content creators, modders and fans, this means completely new TF2 games can be put together – as long as they’re released for free.