Team Fortress 2’s Mann vs. Machine PvE mode is getting a “much-needed” update, according to developer Valve, and the studio is asking the game’s community to help make content for it.
The mode, first released as part of a major update in 2012, sees players team up to defeat hordes of robots attempting to carry a bomb. Destroyed robots drop cash that can be used to purchase class upgrades. According to the Team Fortress 2 wiki, there are currently 29 missions and five operations (groups of missions played in sequence) for Mann vs. Machine.
Now, 13-years-later, Valve is looking to update Mann vs. Machine with the community’s help. Valve, in the signature comedic style it always uses when writing about Team Fortress 2, is asking players to submit Mann vs. Machine maps and missions by August 27 for possible inclusion in the update.
Valve’s tongue-in-cheek blog post clarifies that the update, or at least a portion of it, will be arriving right before Halloween, but that the submitted maps do not need to all be Halloween-themed (though some of them could be, Valve later states).
“The king of the fictional land where this all happened (ancient Greece), 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),” Valve writes.
It’s not the first time Valve has asked for help to create new Team Fortress 2 content. The class-based FPS received 14 new community-made maps as part of a major summer update in 2023. Valve earlier this year released Team Fortress 2’s entire source code, giving the community the power to “change, extend, or rewrite TF2.”
One of Team Fortress 2’s most popular mods, Team Fortress 2 Classic, is set to officially be released on Steam later this year. The mod returns the game to how it was in 2008, albeit with new weapons, modes, and quality-of-life features.
Despite being nearly 20-years-old, Team Fortress 2 still has a strong following on Steam and is one of the best free games on Steam. Over the past six months, the game has maintained anywhere from around 40,000 to 56,000 concurrent players, and actually reached a new concurrent player peak of over 250,000 in 2023 following the release of the previously mentioned summer update.
