TFNews: QWTF Hawaiian Pacific bridge, ETF hyper evolution, TFC pick-up cup bot, TF2 comeback

The 30th year of the Team Fortress saga that started in 1996 is just around the corner. Nevertheless, as if it has only just begun, 2025 is being a spectacular year for various TF games spanning multiple generations. TF2 Classic was perhaps the first one to deliver big news this year. From then on it just kept coming: QuakeWorld Team Fortress Live’s (QWTF Live) new Hawaii server that connects Australian and North American players across the Pacific; the “next gen” update to Enemy Territory Fortress’ (ETF) gameplay; the new Pick-up “Cup” bot of Team Fortress [Classic] PUGs along with the integrated new website; and a new official update announcement to TF2 only a month after witnessing arguably the best LAN tournament of the game’s history.

It is with great pleasure that we are sharing these parallel universe occurrences with you.

QWTF Live connecting the globe like never before

QWTF Live is the actively played fork* of FortressOne (FO). [*Familiarization with some GitHub lingo is useful for these open-source games whose playerbases exist in full integration with their developers. To put it simply: QWTF Live/FO has branched from the original FO, last year.] First created in 2018 by drzel, who also played a key role in attracting many veterans of the mod with the word of mouth, FO client provides a plug&play solution to QWTF Live/FO servers. It is built on FTE Engine, an altered version of the original Quake engine like many others. Technicalities aside, here is what you essentially need to know about it: This one has a solid chance of being the closest thing you can play in your region to the original QWTF experience that started it all, but with enhanced graphics and controls.

After the forking of last year, the developer newby introduced the anti-lag technology which is a massive deal for anything “fortress”, and even for any online multiplayer game according to the community lead WolveriNE. This code allows North & South Americas and Europe to play with 120ms latency with each other, while players from Australia & New Zealand and South East Asia have below 160ms with those three when all these five continents join a server in Phoenix, TX. The magic of the anti-lag technology is not limited to latency reduction either. Thanks to further modifications in the code, these latencies are made to feel much less to the player, as if they are playing with half those latencies. This is regarded as taboo-breaking in terms of the hard dependency associated to low latency in competitive, fast-paced FPS games. But they did not stop there either, and went for the absolute overkill. With significant financial contributions from their small but dedicated community, they recently rented a Hawaii server which will connect the Oceanic folk to the Americans with 90-110ms latency, and playing as if 50ms with the anti-lag code’s enhancement. This extreme availability bringing all the players around the world together is supported by an extensive stats system as well, even comparable to TF2’s logs.tf.

A well-known, old QWTF fragmovie. Although not QWTF Live/FO, it showcases QWTF’s gameplay and its best players at the time.

To enrol in the oldest school of the old school FPS we enjoy… pick-up games are being organized every day and night in the official Discord server. “A/D” CTF (where the teams only capture and only defend, in rows, for a certain amount of time), the main competitive mode for every pre-TF2 fortress game, is played in 2v2 and 4v4 formats. After you spectate a few games and understand the roles of each class, you will be assigned an All-Time-Attack (ATA) role where you change teams mid-match, making it fair for the teams while teaching you the movement and CTF strategy faster. If you followed the European TF2 scene in 2008/9 (the era TF2 Classic is forking from TF2 to spiritually re-imagine) you will also be delighted to see Haunter and Coinz ( Team YoYoTech/TCM Gaming) still actively playing a TF game over there.

If you want to go deep in the rabbit hole of this lineage, there is also the Russian community QWTF.RU. Although still changed, the client they play with is said to be the closest nowadays to the original QWTF. There are the other active Quake/QuakeWorld TF mods of the era, such as MegaTF and CustomTF, that are played on public gatherings like the Frag Fridays of the MegaTF community, and the game nights of Prozac CustomTF on Fridays and Saturdays. Admirably, these mods are still being passionately developed.

The second coming of ETF

Enemy Territory Fortress (ETF) started off around 2005 as the port of Q3F (Quake 3 Fortress, a mod of Quake 3, which is not a free game) to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (a free and open-source game) which is built on the same engine: id Tech 3. Fast-forwarding the year to 2024, there is this summit of like-minded, influential players from the North American QWTF and Team Fortress Classic (TFC) communities, to make a new branch of QWTF Live that would be called QWTFC. The intent was to marry the two TF games together, to combine their better aspects. That project would not come to life, however, one of the participants of that summit, Tulkas, although not a programmer, would be tired of waiting on other people to create the game he wanted to play, and would roll up his sleeves. The fertile soil would be found in ETF, which has apparently been alive, and maintained by Ensiform for the past decade. Hence the seeds are planted for ETF 2.0.

The changes kicked-off this year with increased airspeed and auto-hop, which enabled bunny hopping by holding the jump buttom (as in QWTF Live and Fortress Forever). The ground breaking update in June 2025 introduced reload cancelling and hand-held concing (concussion grenade detonation, which is the most viable jumping method in pre-TF2 fortress games). The former allows players to interrupt reloading and shoot without having to load the whole clip (as in TFC/TF2). Together with this, in-built auto-reload is introduced as well, which is made possible only with scripts in TFC. Hand-held concing, without having to drop the grenade on the ground and position oneself around it, enables more fluid movement patterns (as in TFC). With Tulkas’ own words, these mechanics and the future ones planned aim to make the game more accessible for everyone (even with an only-TF2 background), bridge the gap between QWTF and TFC communities, and amplify the fun aspects of the game.

Huge plays by Odium, showcasing the level of pace and anticipation one can reach up to in ETF.

With its base game originating from 2003, and having been maintained over the years, ETF already looked and felt a lot more modern than most TF games. Fixing the essential shortcomings of QWTF/ETF while preserving its strengths put ETF 2.0 high up in the tree of evolution and made it the popular choice of the last weeks.

On-boarding to ETF’s intergenerational blessing is similar to QWTF Live. What they call “gather”s (the old term used in place of “pick-up”) are being organized in the official Discord server, usually in North American servers, every evening (early morning for EU, and with decent latencies supported by newby’s anti-lag tech for ETF). The Discord server also comprises a mapping community which is very active and supported by playtests.

TFC complete overhaul

The North American competitive TFC community Team Fortress PUGs (on Discord) is soon getting their new, omnipotent Discord bot, currently being coded by Phil. Fully integrated to their new website tfpugs.com (a preview version is already online), it will log and tabulate the results and leaderboards of all game modes, from PuGs and other gatherings. The legacy 4v4 league of The Catacombs will also be embodied by TF PUGs now, leveraging its new bot, achievements and servers. One of the best new tricks of the promised bot is a 1v1 pick-up “cup” system that works with 4 players queued up. The players will be able to match in two 1v1 games, after which the winners and the losers of those games will match again, effectively making it a mini-tournament. But the crown jewel for many is the automated achievements which the bot will track and assign to players. Finally, the expansion to South America with a PuG server in Santiago, Chile will effectively make TF PUGs a bicontinental organization.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Europe’s ETFC (European Team Fortress Classic, on Discord), although nothing as innovative, things are running as steady and smooth as ever. The recent fragmovie of Manu, a regular of that community, shows what TFC is capable of in 2025 (see below). The editing is refreshing, for this era where fragmovies are mostly raw footage played non-stop over the same color and music.

On-boarding to these competitive PuGs might be more demanding in TFC, since active public servers do exist here. This is where a successful, commercial publisher (Valve) shows its benefits. Even after all these years, and behind a very popular, active sequel, 1999TFC is a North American public TFC server that is populated every day; and Royston Vasey is a public UK server and community (on Discord nowadays) that is rooted to the early days of TFC, and still gathers every Saturday. One can warm up, socialize and feel welcomed in these public communities while spectating some games in the PuG communities. This routine, supported by personal movement training that makes it work more than half the time, is probably sufficient for an acceptable start in competitive.

TF2 the comeback kid

It is the general opinion in 2025’s competitive TF2 that with the meta evolving and the players getting better every year, the skill ceiling is pushed ever higher, however, the number of participants and the interest is unfortunately not comparable to that of mid 2010s.

Therefore, it was unexpectedly huge that Fireside Casts successfully organized Physgun Fireside Denver 2025 in Denver, CO which brought Australia’s best team (Witness Gaming AU) alongside the European and North American favourites, making it a three-way intercontinental for the first time in 8 years (from 2017’s Rewind Invitational in Santa Ana, CA which had Jasmine Tea as well as Se7en). Not only did the Australian side break the everlasting 4th-place spell by winning the bronze medal, but the tournament was also regarded as the best TF2 LAN ever in terms of hype, competition and the abundance of talent.

Note that this happened a few months after Valve made TF2’s code public (enabling Steam release and inheritance of all live TF2 features for TF2 Classic and other mods); and only a month before they asked the community for content for the MvM (“PvE”) mode, to release them in the first official major TF2 update since 2017.

July 2025 was almost going to see poLANd.tf Highlander 2025, the first full-scale highlander (9v9) LAN since Copenhagen Games 2019, which is now delayed to July 2026. The important thing is that fire is again sparked for highlander. With poLANd.tf 2025 (6v6) in March being the huge success it was, and online tournaments such as the insane MGE 1v1 World Championship with $5000 prize pool keeping us amazed, there is no reason not to strongly believe that things will only ramp up until the next summer. Almost 18 years old, TF2 is perhaps having its best year in the decade of 2020s so far, both competitively and otherwise.

In the Fortress Forever

Another major, alive TF game that deserves mention in such an article is Fortress Forever (FF). It was the first one to be built and released on Source engine (with SDK 2006), even before TF2! Unluckily, only a few weeks before the release of TF2 in 2007, hence, partially in its shadow. That did not change how great this “modernized TFC” looks and feels though, and it thrived nevertheless. One has to experience revving Heavy’s minigun at least once in this game, or blowing enemies into pieces with the high-speed RPG. Having the best graphics and arguably the most modern HUD out of all pre-TF2 fortress games, on top of an elaborate Training mode, it also provides soft landing grounds into the old-school TF gameplay for players coming from TF2.

Despite all it has to offer, FF has struggled with getting consistent attendance this year. A few PuGs are organized per month in the official Discord server; and the Steam-released game sees one of its public servers going full every now and then, which is disproportionate to what it holds in its arsenal. Its foundation is so strong that it would not need something much more than a joint effort for promotion or scheduled game sessions, in order to regain its glory. Resurgence would not come as a surprise in a year that has been so successful for Team Fortress.

Looking back at these mods and games of Team Fortress still surviving after decades, and the most commercially successful one still being one of the most played games of the world every year, proves how rich and sturdy the design philosophy is in its core. Looking further deep, one realizes how much dedication and hard work by the community it actually takes to make it happen. Even for the most mainstream kin of this multigenerational tribe, no success is to be taken for granted.

The playerbases of some are intertwined while some are complete strangers to each other. They are filling the Discord servers in dozens of thousands for some of these mods while for another they queue up to initiate a long-awaited PuG. Whichever the case may be, every interaction, “every person playing counts” as somebody stated recently.

Thank you for reading, interacting, and keeping the flame alive.

5 Comments

Güven

I'd like to personally thank, Evelin, WolveriNE, Tulkas, Phil, craig from ETF and Aberrant from MegaTF for the extensive information they shared, and the fact checking that was essential in the preparation of this article; Also Naz from ETFC, craig, and many others for helping me on-board and experience these games first-hand in the past few weeks; Last but not least, f and Voodoo as always; and elektro and Ta5K from CompTF2C for helping out with the writing.

July 1, 2025

v7606

very cool that there are communities focused on these old team fortress games.

July 1, 2025

ccccc

incredible writeup!!

July 2, 2025

Manu

Well written article and thank you for publishing my video in it! Appreciate it. Love the fact that TFC is still going strong after so many years.

July 2, 2025

WolveriNE

Thanks for taking the time to research our ancient game! We hope this article will bring about more players and see players trying different TF games.

July 2, 2025