Valve releases its Team Fortress 2 Halloween-themed event, unveiling a new crate, two new taunts, three community maps, and some boosts to unboxing odds.

Although news previously broke that Team Fortress 2 wouldn't be receiving a new event from Valve for Halloween this year, that doesn't mean that Valve is entirely overlooking the holiday. Team Fortress 2 has now received an update for Halloween featuring a myriad of new items, taunts, and maps.

The new Halloween update is Scream Fortress VIII, and like all prior Halloween celebrations it allows players to access all of the Halloween-specific additions or events that were released in prior updates, like facing off against the Horseless Headless Horsemann and casting magic spells. In terms of new content, this year's Scream Fortress VIII event is bringing two new taunts, three community-made Halloween-themed maps, and a new crate that holds 21 different cosmetic items and one item that adds an unusual effect to any taunt. In addition, Valve has temporarily doubled the likelihood of unboxing an unusual cosmetic from any crate, and all crates that are opened during the event will have a Halloween unusual effect applied to them.

Team Fortress 2's two new taunts include Victory Lap, which is Valve's creation, and is essentially a taunt that lets the player cruise around whenever they'd like in the Merasmus bumper car that was introduced in a Halloween update back in 2014. The other is Second Rate Sorcery, which features a unique taunt for each class attempting to cast magic (and failing terribly).

The free-to-play Team Fortress 2 has been largely overshadowed by Overwatch recently, in part due to its lack of major content and updates in recent years. However, Valve is arguably still showing more support for a free ten-year-old game than the vast majority of game developers would. However, some gamers are still disappointed that Valve hasn't made an effort to create a new Halloween event for the last two years. While Team Fortress 2's new matchmaking system was eagerly anticipated by the playerbase, it's since been criticized as having major flaws. in addition to a lack of major updates and new content for the game during the rest of the year.

While Team Fortress 2 receives regular patches and Valve adds community-created content to the game fairly regularly, the developer has become less involved in creating its own new content and major updates for the game. However, the game does still have some changes planned for the future, with a major update coming to the Pyro class in the near future following the Pyro vs Heavy Meet Your Match event, so the game could eventually receive the major updates fans are hoping for.

Team Fortress 2's Scream Fortress VIII event will run from now until November 9th.

Source: Valve