Team Fortress 2 modders love nothing more than imagining alternate histories for Valve’s long-running multiplayer shooter, and this year has seen several of these nostalgia-tinged conversions migrate from the rolling pastures of the web into Steam’s smog-belching metropolis. In March, Team Fortress 2 Classic revealed it would be launching on Valve’s platform sometime in 2025, while Team Fortress 2 Legacy—which reverts TF2’s core systems to their 2008 standard—also plans to infiltrate Steam’s base before the year is out.
Now, another revisionist TF2 mod has announced it is joining this merry throng. Pre-Fortress 2 positions itself as the evolutionary missing-link between the original Half-Life mod and Valve’s hat-tastic sequel, reintroducing several ideas present in Team Fortress but deemed vestigial for TF2, while embellishing them with the sequel’s quirky, cartoonish character.
Foremost among these are grenades. Pre-Fortress 2 flings throwable explosives back into the action, expanding your ordnance way beyond the traditional deadly pineapple with class-specific grenades. Scouts receive concussion grenades and, er, bear-traps, while pyros get napalm grenades, engineers EMP grenades, medics healing grenades… you see how this works.
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Alongside this, Pre-Fortress 2 reinstates numerous weapons and more specific mechanics from Team Fortress Classic. Your arsenal is expanded to include the nailgun, the tranquilizer, the detonation pipe launcher, and the flame rocket. On the systems side, flag-throwing is revived, while the medic can heal teammates with his syringe or jab opponents with it to infect them with rot.
The mod even throws in a few ideas of its own. Engineers can repair the armour of allies using their wrench, while both teleporters and dispensers are team-agnostic, letting anyone use them. The flame rocket allows its wielder to perform a rocket-jump, while random critical hits are a thing of the past (or, given the point on the timeline where Pre-Fortress 2 inserts itself, future).
There’s no word on when Pre-Fortress 2 will arrive on Steam. But if you simply can’t wait for that hybridised Team Fortress action, you can download the mod on the Pre-Fortress 2 website.
This is normally the bit where I’d write about how Valve abandoned Team Fortress 2 to become a bot-riddled mess, but in all fairness, TF2 is getting quite a bit of love from its prodigal parent this year. July brought a substantial update that added a bunch of community-made maps, while Valve is planning another “much-needed” update in August targeting TF2’s cooperative mod Mann vs. Machine. There’s even a third patch slated for October. Between this and the great mod migration, 2025 is shaping up to be the best year TF2 has enjoyed for some time.
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