PC Gamer recently revealed changes planned for Valve Software's team based first person shooter, Team Fortress 2. The next update for the game will include the additions of item trading, a new game mode, and a variety of new weapons and hats.

Item trading has been the big, glaring omission from all the interesting stuff Valve have been doing with drops, unlocks and taped-on monocles since the Medic update in 2008. Now, at last, you’ll be able to swap your Vintage Merryweather for your friend’s Prussian Picklehaube.

The weapons and hats are from the Polycount contest, which we’ve previously covered. We knew they’d be going into the game sometime, but not when. We also didn’t know that they wouldn’t be treated like normal community items, which normally only get minor attributes because Valve don’t have time to playtest anything more drastic.

“It’s a reflection of the amount of time we had to spend on them,” Robin Walker says, “and us being very safe. I think the Crit-a-Cola was designed the day before it went out, to be honest, which is terrifying. But sometimes we can think of something that you can make a pretty educated guess on, yeah, this is going to work out. We definitely have lowballed those in the past, in that we’ve chosen something that’s more underpowered than overpowered, because we can just make it a little better later. The Polycount items have had a lot more time on them as a whole, so, we’re doing more interesting stuff there than in general we have with the other items.”

No specifics on the new game mode yet – Robin says “We’ll probably start talking about that stuff soon once we’ve figured out how to talk about it.” Clearly it’s Cthulhu themed, and they’re having trouble pronouncing “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn“. All he could utter with his mortal tongue was “We’re going to ship a new game mode, and then we have a couple of other exciting features that we’ve been working on for a while that should be really really fun.”

PC Gamer: Team Fortress 2 Upcoming Update Details

Valve Software

Team Fortress 2

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