The Gun Mettle big update adding new guns, new boxes, new prizes, new maps, new achievements and lots of new news. To celebrate in the usual Valve fashion, a comic was released when the campaign was announced.
Since TF2 became a freemium game, the usual style in which Valve has implemented any form of transaction comes from being able to participate in certain features; much like CS:GO’s Operation Bloodhound. In order to participate in the weekly challenges to earn unique weapons, you must buy a Campaign Pass priced at $5.99. A portion of each successfully sold pass will go into pay community mapmakers.
The above is as far as it goes for paid content in TF2. Valve has rest assured that the free-to-play users will still benefit by receiving three new community maps, special taunts you can obtain through the usual drops and a strange new mechanic in game that lets you pick up the dead’s weaponry.
That last bit is quite huge as it means strategies can be changed quite heavily during matches as it’ll become harder to predict what weaponry an enemy has at any moment. It’s worrisome but it does have an appeal to keep things fresh. Alongside that, there have been some changes to the Scout and Spy, more significant than the other classes. The changes can be seen here.
I haven’t played much TF2 in the last few months, so it’ll be a nice little reason to at least take a look again and see some of these changes in action and shake my head as I remember simpler times.