Cosmetics & Weapons

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:Team Fortress 2.

This page or section needs more images. There's a whole lotta words here, but not enough pictures. Please fix this. Specifically: Add concept art of weapons added after launch.

Team Fortress 2 is Free to Play#

On June 23, 2011, Valve put out a video announcing that Team Fortress 2 was going Free to Play. Within this video, several recently-released weapons and cosmetics are seen, as this change to Free to Play occurred the same day as the June 23, 2011 patch (The Über Update). What is also shown off, potentially accidentally, are two weapons that were never made official;

• The Schwaben Charger 9000, a new Medi Gun for the Medic, from Y_M's Heavy Duty Medicine Polycount contest item set.
• The Head-Trimmer, a new melee weapon for the Pyro, from Guitbox's Horticultural Process Polycount contest item set.

When the source code for Team Fortress 2, dated to be from between August and October 2017, was leaked in early 2020, an interesting discovery was found related to the Head-Trimmer in the code for the Decapitation functionality used on some of the Demoman's melee weapons. Within the function itself is a class check that checks to see if the attacker is a Demoman. If the attacker is a Demoman, the code then proceeds to update the attacker's Heads count. Above this check is a developer comment that reads:

// The pyro's scythe is actually a "sword" as far as the gameplay code is concerned,
// but we don't want the demo's head-collecting silliness to apply.

This indicates that the base weapon used for the Head-Trimmer was tf_weapon_sword and as such, was able to decapitate players. However, the Heads meter that the Demoman has would not be used for the Pyro.

The Mann Co. Factory Floor#

A blogpost in the official TF2 website written on 5 June 2014 talking about three cut weapons (and the not-cut BASE Jumper), how they functioned, and why they were cut. It is unknown how these weapons would have looked.

• The Big Bomb was a scrapped secondary weapon for the Demoman, meant to combine all eight of his sticky bombs into one big bomb, as the name implies. This weapon was cut as it proved to be very problematic in playtests for both sides, the player and their foes.
• The Facestab knife was a scrapped Spy knife that would replace backstabs with insta-kills from the front, also known as facestabs.
• The Sucker was a Pyro primary that replaced the airblast with a vacuum that pulled players towards the Pyro. The Sucker not only had gameplay problems, but also technical problems, mainly with the game's prediction system.