 Good evening. Team Fortress 2 is a game with some legendary promotional material. Between the comics and the shorts, Valve's creative and funny approach to world building has led millions of people to fall in love with the game's setting and its characters. This is a big part of why TF2's culture remains very popular to this day, even among people who don't actively play the game. The heavy and the soldier continue to live on through fan animations and memes, even as Valve's support and work on the game wanes to an all-time low and the community is hit with waves of bad news. But while a good amount of people watching are probably familiar enough with the TF2 shorts to tell you in the comments exactly what was censored from Meet the Demoman, TF2's pre-release promotional material is comparatively pretty niche. See, back in 2006, Valve made two trailers for the game that were both shown off at public games conferences to build hype for its upcoming release. But unlike the Meet the Team shorts, these trailers were purely meant to show off the game's mechanics and included no dialogue from any of the characters. But despite these presentations being from not even a year before TF2's release, what was shown looked remarkably different from what we're all familiar with today. The art style is brighter, a lot of the classes have completely different weapons, the two-forged bridge has no roof, etc. So why were these trailers so weird? Well, as you could probably guess, the answer is that TF2 as we know it went through a lot of changes throughout its development. Even after Valve decided on a cartoony spy tech game instead of the alien or military prototype state originally drafted, there were still a lot of things that changed about the game's design, even in the very last year before its release. And for a very long time, in fact, since the game's final launch in October 2007, there has been a huge audience of people who are fascinated with and wish that they could play this weird 2006 version of TF2. Today is those people's lucky day. What you're looking at is footage from a Team Fortress 2 project called Pre-Fortress 2. I had the pleasure of getting my hands on it early to see what it had to offer, and the experience was interesting to say the very least. As hinted at by its title, Pre-Fortress 2 is a TF2 mod which takes concepts from early phases of the game's development and re-implements them in order to bring us an experience akin to what was advertised in those weird 2006 trailers. There are, of course, some slight creative liberties taken for the sake of accessibility, but for the most part, this is an authentic TF2 beta experience. And it is every bit as odd as those trailers made it seem. The way TF2 plays resembles TF2's archaic predecessors a lot more than the game we have today does, and it bridges the gap between them in a really unique way. Everything between the maps and the gameplay mechanics are disorientingly different, and playing it almost makes you feel like you're a new booting up TF2 for the first time again. But in a good way. Allow me to explain. Probably the first thing you notice upon joining a match is that every player is equipped with grenades, which they can throw at any time with a simple button press. See, grenades were at one point actually considered to be a staple of the Team Fortress franchise, and until fairly late in its development, they were planned to play a heavy role in TF2. But over time, Valve began to have concerns about grenade spamming and exploits, and eventually made the choice to can them, which was a very controversial move that they were honestly kind of lucky to have shaken the backlash from. Prefortress 2 re-implements this canned grenade system in a very stylish, fully animated fashion, and allows us the players to gauge whether or not Valve made the right decision in axing them. There are a lot of different types of grenades. How many or what types you get differs depending on which class you're playing. For example, the scout gets concussion grenades that disorient your enemy's aim, and bear traps that slow them down when stepped on. Pyro gets a fire grenade that offers powerful area denial, kind of like the Molotovs in CSGO do. The soldier gets frag grenades in this insane fucking nail turret thing. I don't know what the hell this is. Demo gets dynamite, like was shown in the game's early trailers. I think you get the gist. The re-implementation of grenades on its own dramatically alters the way combat encounters play out. On a surface level, of course they allow for wacky shenanigans like nape jumping and even kamikaze bombing, but on a deeper level, they make you approach levels you thought you knew from a completely new and interesting perspective. And on top of all that, pretty much all the classes have had at least one or two things tweaked about their loadout, new weapons and whatnot. There's a lot to talk about, and some changes are definitely more drastic than others. For starters, the scout gets the shotgun instead of the scatter gun, and he also gets the highly coveted nail gun, which I'm not gonna sugarcoat I personally despise. But it is cool to see it in action and observe how it changes the gameplay flow. It's weird that scout kinda counters engineer now though. The scout also doesn't have a double jump, which I know probably seems sacrilegious. However, he does have those concussion grenades which make flinging across the map stupidly easy, so he still does have a lot of fun mobility. Soldier is one of the only classes who's been left pretty much the same, although he has rockets sticking out of his gun like he did in some of the trailers, which I find to look really weird, especially in first person. But the pyro. Now, the pyro has perhaps the most insane changes in the entire game. You might think that because he doesn't have an air blast, he'd be a shadow of his past or future self, but you'd be so, so wrong. In place of the pyro's alt fire air blast are incendiary rockets that somehow share ammo reserve with your flamethrower. And I'm gonna be real, this is fucking insane. Like, a guy on bath salts chasing you down the street butt ass naked insane. I can't ignore it. Pyro is kinda busted in this game. Between the area Deniali gets from his Molotovs and the range and jump mobility offered by his rockets, he's very powerful. And since there's no air blast, you also can't get help from friendly pyros once you've been ignited, so you've gotta wait out the full afterburn duration if there's no health or water nearby, even if you only barely got hit with a small incendiary rocket splash from across the map. But even as wild and almost unconscionable as this change is, I still kinda find it cool just because of how much it shakes up the game. Pf2 really turns the pyro into the psychotic menace that he's portrayed as in the TF2 shorts, and having not seen an actual TF2 balance change in years at this point, I've somehow begun to miss the days of testing out even outrageous broken changes. Oh yeah, his fire axe is also replaced with a branding iron that has the Team Fortress initials written on it, which is cute. Anyway, the most interesting change to the Demoman is that his sticky bomb launcher has been gutted, and replaced with what the game describes as a remote pipe bomb launcher. This thing shoots projectiles that are kind of a hybrid of both stickies and pipes. They bounce and roll around on the ground, but they'll only explode when detonated with your alt fire. The golden rule of stickies still applies though. They haven't missed until you detonate them. This new arsenal does make blast jumping and taking down sentries a little more difficult, but honestly, dealing it with their grenades is kinda more fun anyway, so I don't really mind. The heavy is pretty much the same. Though instead of his fist, he gets an actual melee weapon in the form of a big-ass lead pipe. He can throw dynamite too. Earlier in the mod's development, it was easy to blast jump with it, but it was just too ridiculous and hard to balance, so they had to nerf it. I do kinda miss it though. Weirdly enough, the engineer's entire getup is almost completely identical to how it was on launch, although his ability to move buildables has been backported despite the historical inaccuracy because, let's just face it, he kinda sucks without it. The engineer is also probably the biggest victim of PF2. He's really frustrating to play because everyone and everything can instantly destroy your nest with grenades. Even other engineers. One thing that's interesting about the NG is that he can use his wrench to repair teammates armor, which is kinda fitting since he's the class with responsibilities. Some of his buildings also look different, but overall, him, the soldier, and the heavy are probably the classes that most closely resemble their modern day iteration. But moving on to the medic, now he is pretty interesting. Instead of a needle gun, the medic gets a combat SMG, and if you couldn't tell, this thing is cool as hell. Maybe too cool. It honestly might be a bad thing that between the machine gun and the grenades, battle medic is about 500 times more viable and fun to play than it has ever been in the real game. Given how I feel about nail guns though, I love this change, and I honestly prefer it's how the medic plays in the real game. He also has a healing grenade that can be used to replenish multiple teammates at once or to save yourself in a pinch. And instead of a bone saw, he has a syringe that heals your teammates and poisons your enemies with bleed damage. Honestly, the change is made to the medic in this mod rock, and make him a lot more fun to play. I know one of TF2's design principles seem to have been avoid giving classes generic weapons at all costs, but I'll take this combat SMG over the crusaders crossbow any day. Speaking of SMGs, the snipers is still exactly the same, although his primary rifle behaves like the one in Team Fortress Classic, or the classic from TF2. Since what slows you down is using the red dot and not the scoping, you can run around scoped in at full speed which I think looks pretty funny. He also has a club instead of a machete for some reason. He is on his Neanderthal shit. And last but not least, the spy, who gets both a cool james bond looking reskin of his revolver and the highly coveted tranquilizer gun. The tranq gun disorients the mouse sensitivity of and slows down whoever it hits, so you can weaken and confuse an enemy with the tranq gun and then finish him off with the revolver for a quick combo. And just like the pyro, the spy gets area denial but in the form of a gas grenade. As cool as it is to rock out with this extended spy set, the fact that the weapon select order is all changed around really disorients me when playing as him. Now with most of the intricate gameplay stuff out of the way, I want to talk about the game's levels because I have quite a lot to say about them as well. Not counting the training course, pre-fortress comes with 13 maps, which as you'd probably expect are all from pretty early in TF's lifespan. A good amount of them have been altered to resemble the game's concept art and early visuals more which is pretty charming. And some have even had to lay out reverted to weird early versions from the game's development that are really trippy to explore. Check out Dust Bowl, just how you remembered it. And 2-4-2. There's also an early version of the map Badlands which is based more heavily on its design from TFC. Gotta say, what TF2 did to this map was nothing short of a miracle. This really is a nightmare to traverse. But I'm glad they included it, it's pretty cool. Oh yeah, and this game's rendition of Gold Rush is just flat out bizarre. Apart from some standard visual changes, the first two areas seem relatively untouched. But when you get to the last stage, right at the main choke point, the map suddenly starts to look a hell of a lot like Badwater. Apparently, Badwater's latter half was originally designed as the last stage of Gold Rush, and here we get to see how that would have turned out. It's very weird. Despite the map being released in 2017, PF2 also includes Powerhouse, because its development technically started in 2007 as a sister map to Hydro. I personally think Powerhouse kind of sucks, but apparently there's plans to redo its visuals just like the other maps, so that should be interesting to see. But my personal favorite map in the game is Crossover, which is an old TFC level remade from scratch and transformed into the game's only King of the Hill map. Crossover is beautiful, and I honestly think it might exemplify the vibe carried from early TF2 concept art more than any of the game's actual maps. It's also really fun. As someone who's a big fan of King of the Hill, I honestly wouldn't mind seeing Crossover in the real game. It's that well done. TF2's art style differed from its concept art pretty heavily on launch. It is even less recognizable now, so I think it's cool to see PF2 bring the game's looks back to their real roots. The changes they made to the visuals are really interesting and lead to a completely different vibe. Now, this is the part of the video where I present a Crossover. Is it kind of stupid to dig through Valve's 20 year old trash can and start eating their garbage? Yes. But Prefortress 2 succeeds in allowing people to experience one of the greatest FPS games of all time in an inventive new way, and provides a lot of cool historical value as well. People have been making mods to restore the game's pre-release visuals for more than a decade now, so I'm happy that people who find that era interesting, such as myself, finally have a destination to get their TF2 beta fix. It's obviously not perfect though, and playing it you definitely do start to soak in the reasoning behind why Valve made the changes they did. Like, grenades are really cool, but they also are very spammable and exploit prone. As far as I could tell, the armor system has virtually no impact on gameplay apart from being another thing for players to manage, and I'm sure there's other quirks and things people will notice and take a dislike too as they play as well. Personally, I'd say what I consider to be the biggest shortcoming of the mod, other than maybe the pyro's power, is its small map pool. Maybe I'm just bloated and overfed from TF2's enormous decade-stretching catalogue, but it's kind of disappointing to see a rotation of only 13 maps, three of which are just the same level in different game modes. I would love to see more classic TF maps remade as well, like maybe Avanti, Kazba, or uh, Banana Land I guess. Anyway, even if it isn't a totally impeccable product, Prefortress 2 is free, and more than succeeds in just generally being a cool and interesting experience. Exactly like real TF2, come to think of it. So if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people starving for new and interesting TF2 content slowly losing your mind, I'd for sure recommend downloading the game and giving it a try. It just might help scratch your itch a little bit. And hey, apparently a lot more content is on the way in future updates, so that's something to be excited about. But that's all I've got for today. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video, and have a nice day. And I'm finna bust a nut, but guess what happened?