Not a joke: Team Fortress 2 gets a public beta

Years later, Valve has put out a public Team Fortress 2 beta. To quote Nick Chester, “What’s next, Atari announces a Pong beta?” While generally the idea is to release this sort of thing before a game comes out, in the case of TF2, it makes perfect sense. I’m a little surprised they didn’t do this earlier.

Anyone who’s been following the game knows that it’s an ever-changing landscape. What this beta will do is allow Valve to push out changes faster, and possibly even get crazier with experimentation. Officially, the beta will be used for a number of new things:

• Testing and tuning various class, item, and weapon changes
• Testing map changes and variants
• Running higher level, game-wide experiments (like doubling player health)
• Testing new technologies without the risk of breaking the game

All TF2 owners can get in on this immediately. Just look for the TF2 beta in your game library on Steam. For more on what changes are being tested right now, read up on Valve’s full blog post.

[Thanks, Zippyduda]