What timing.
As Team Fortress 2 players continue begging Valve to take a more active role in dealing with the game's botting problems, it is maybe not a good look that the first new Team Fortress 2-related DLC announced in years is for another game entirely (via Wario64). And not just any other game: it's Funko Fusion, which answers the question "What if you made something like Lego Star Wars but out of garbage?"
I'm an avowed Funko Pop hater—I truly despise the way the brand has taken thousands of creative works from across decades of pop culture and smooshed all of them together into the same ugly, beady-black-eyed cheap plastic paean to blandness. I am deeply skeptical that Funko Fusion will offer the "uniquely authentic, irreverent humor" it promises as it recreates scenes from famous films with its ugly dolls. But there's a certain extra salt in the wound element to this TF2 Funko Fusion reveal at a time when the game's community still feels like they have to shout just to keep the shooter alive on a drip feed of life support updates.
I didn't have to look far to find reactions as unenthused as my own. The top thread on the TF2 subreddit right now is about Funko Fusion, and the comments are as I expected. "Genuinely would rather bots continue to overrun the game than this happen. We are in the worst timeline," writes GAMRKNIGHT352.
"TF2 update anywhere else but TF2," writes Tlacitel. "peak comedy not gonna lie," says MBluna9.
I'll grant that not everyone's as down on the Funkos as I am—a few folks are hopeful this means more physical TF2 Funkos will get made or that Valve has more TF2 updates of its own planned. The latter would be nice, but sounds awfully fanciful: Judging by the Team Fortress 2 wiki, the last proper major update was in October 2017, while the occasional seasonal updates since then have at least kept some new stuff flowing into the game via the Steam Workshop community. But it sure seems like the days of Team Fortress 2 being in active development are long done.
The Team Fortress 2 Pack for Funko Fusion is, at least, free on Steam, and will add Scout, Engineer, Medic and Heavy to the game when it launches on September 13. It's "packing more punch than the sandvich," the DLC page says, in an exciting example of the uniquely authentic humor we all have to look forward to.
