Valve announces Team Fortress 2 is getting 'a much-needed update' focused on Mann vs. Machine: 'A chilling cautionary tale where an artificial consciousness tried to take all our jobs'

Valve has announced an upcoming Team Fortress 2 update as only Valve can. A new blog post begins:

"Thirteen years ago, we launched Mann vs. Machine, a chilling cautionary tale where an artificial consciousness tried to take all our jobs. You didn't know it back then, but that was actually a literary device called 'speculative' fiction, where writers (us) accurately predict the future (the present), but then hide it so as not to cause widespread panic."

Mann vs. Machine made its debut in 2012 and ever since the PvE mode has been one of the more popular ways to play: even today you'll easily find a match. Up to six players fight waves of AI bots (themed around the TF2 characters) while pushing a payload towards Mann Co., and spending cash to upgrade between rounds.

In a roundabout way, Valve says Mann vs. Machine is getting "a much-needed update" and so it's asking "the community to submit Mann vs. Machine maps and missions in time for that update" which has "the fictional deadline [of] Wednesday, August 27th."

This is in keeping with how Valve has maintained TF2 over the last decade or so. This will be the first substantial update in a long time, but this can be overstated: the last major update is generally thought of as 2017's Jungle Inferno, but Valve has periodically added new stuff ever since and leaned heavily on community-created content to do so. The game broke its all-time player count in 2023 when an update included a new community map with a plump seal, among other things, which some declared "the best thing they've ever added to the game."

The TF2 blog post then goes on the kind of digression that makes one suspect the hand of (longtime Valve writer) Erik Wolpaw lies behind it. The king of ancient Greece, you see, "decreed on stone tablets that even though the update was dropping right around the ancient Greek candy-harvest festival of Halloween, the maps did not need to all be Halloween-themed (first tablet) and in fact shouldn't be (second tablet).

"'Though some of them COULD be,' the king carved into a third tablet, held in the stone hands of a statue... of PRIMATE GEORGE WASHINGTON? No! It's just regular George Washington in a dystopian future past where our sculptors are NOT AS GOOD AS IN ANCIENT GREECE! What an ending! (The end.)"

It is not, in fact, the end. But it could be "a chilling glimpse into a future that could arrive as soon as, again, Wednesday, August 27th with a second part arriving right before Halloween?"

So if I've read this right, which is not as easy as it seems, TF2 is getting a Mann vs. Machine update in two parts, with the first dropping late August and the second around October 31. There's no further detail on what to expect but Valve knows this community, and if it's happy to stir them up a little then knows it will have to deliver something substantial.

Over on the TF2 subreddit they're all just cock-a-hoop that Valve's janitor has found a working terminal. Some like Shaclo are triumphant: "We are going to live forever." Some are befuddled: "Promise of content? In my hat simulator?" Others just look back across the span of time: "In 2017 during Jungle Inferno's launch if someone were to tell me that TF2's next major update would be an MVM update and it would release 8 years later I probably would've laughed at them." Mainly, though, they're just delighted that Valve once again remembered the game exists.

Chat is this real? from r/tf2

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