More than 15 years following its initial release on PC, Valve's Team Fortress 2 has just received an all-new community-focused content update without so much as an announcement ahead of it. Though the player base knew that a big update would be coming sometime in 2023, Valve kept things close to its chest long enough for the release to come as a surprise.

RELATED: Team Fortress 2 Assets Leaked Online

Now, months after the announcement, the first major Team Fortress 2 update in years is finally available for players to enjoy, and it includes a huge list of community-made content. Some of the highlights include 14 all-new maps and the Summer 2023 Cosmetic Case, which contains 25 new community-contributed items. Players can also expect to discover 20 new Unusual effects and six new Taunts, as well as almost a dozen new War Paints. On top of all of this, Valve is also running a special in-game Summer event until September 15, highlighting the changes and additions.

As was the case with Team Fortress 2's 2022 update, the new content release also comes with a large suite of tweaks, fixes, and changes to the existing content, but it's not all good news. As community members have already highlighted, Valve didn't end up including all the community fixes players were hoping to see, and nothing's been done to curb the game's botting problem, either. So even though it is a welcome addition to the game's substantial roster of content, for some players, Valve hasn't done enough to bring Team Fortress 2 into 2023 after all.

After Team Fortress 2 broke player records back in 2021, it seemed all but inevitable that Valve would pick the project back up and invest some time into making it as good as it should be, but much still needs to be done. According to veteran community members, Valve's priority should be to implement the fixes and improvements that fans themselves have been working on for years, and it's currently unclear why this hasn't already been done.

With that in mind, though the big new update for the game is good news indeed, it's also worth remembering that Team Fortress 2 is still overrun with bots and riddled with legacy code problems that Valve may be unwilling to truly resolve. There's no information available right now as to whether more updates might be coming over the course of 2023, but it's definitely possible this may be the case.

Team Fortress 2 is available now on PC.

MORE: Team Fortress 2 Players Defeat a Team of Bots Only Using a Conga Line

Source: Team Fortress 2