For a 15-year-old game, Team Fortress 2 maintains a surprisingly vibrant community. As of this writing, more than 97,000 people play the game.

This is also the community that decided this year that enough was enough and began pressuring Valve to pay a little more attention; Valve's occasional black-boxing, its habit of minimal public comment and surprise updates, has left those invested in the company's Valve's habit of minimal public comment and surprise updates can frustrate those who have invested in its games. Roadmap" We don't need a roadmap to get where we want to go!

And once again, Valve has done it again with a new update for Team Fortress 2 (opens in new tab) that adds a feature absolutely core to the future and functionality of the game, Counter-Strike: this is a system already built into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Left 4 Dead 2 that allows mappers to embed script code into their maps.

Valve lists some of the main features as follows:

This video gives an overview of the possibilities of VScript and some of the things already created during the beta (opens in a new tab). As a result, Team Fortress 2 map makers and modders can now more easily create seriously impressive things and make elements of TF2 work in ways that were previously impossible (or a complete nightmare if they could). One of the earliest examples was the creation of a 3D golf game, while others introduced huge character models and potential modes.

For example, Dodgeball, long one of the most popular TF2 mods, is now VScript.

LizardOfOz, the TF2 modder who created the popular TF2 game mode "Vs Saxton Hale," has created his own video on the possibilities of VScript titled "this changes everything" and has used these tools to recreate some of the most popular He stated that he is working on re-creating the work.

There is already a proof of concept in this mini-dispenser for the possibilities regarding custom weapons, items, and even classes.

"The power that VScript offers to custom content creators is so enormous that even those who understand it have only seen the surface," wrote Ultravod, a member of the TF2 community (opens in new tab). "The MvM custom community can now use VScript to create content that will last a lifetime, and I haven't been this excited about something in TF2 since... . since 2015."

Valve's long-term intention for TF2 has always felt, as it undoubtedly has for many years, to be a game that is largely supported by the community, and the VScript implementation is the ultimate expression of that.

It is also undeniably interesting that the community has been clamoring for a substantial update to this title and Valve has responded with an update that allows the community to make substantial updates themselves. This update was made possible by Saxton Hale's "Here's the tool, make your own update!" and it is easy to imagine that he handed it to the most vocal members of the community.

More recently, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the bot problem in Team Fortress 2, which has become such an issue among the community that Valve was (eventually) forced to address it (opens in new tab). But if there is one thing that can be trusted to make the most of these tools, it is the community that has added to and even maintained the beloved game over the years (opens in new tab).