By John Walker on February 3rd, 2012 at 8:54 am.
According to some typically cryptic words on the Team Fortress 2 blog, 2012 holds a “secret project” for the game, and they promise it is neither a hat, nor a map. But they don’t say what it actually is. And there comes the promise that this year will finally see the final Meet The Team video, giving the Pyro the coverage she so deserves. And apparently it’s going to contain an awful lot of blood. But no mention of fire. Finally, there will apparently be a more imminently revealed secret related to the Saxxy Awards. But who knows.
So I challenge RPS readers to speculate – what is the next new inclusion for the game? An entirely new game mode? A new character to muddle all the balancing? An RPG set in the TF2 universe in which you play as a struggling Scout, trying to find his way in the brutal world? A new hat?
Half-Life 3?
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nope
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Yes! Seeing as they are scared of the number 3, AND they are releasing MEET THE PYRO this year (which is the THIRD class in the character selection)… IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!
http://i.imgur.com/3v44D.jpg
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HA, yes, the pyro is number 3, it’s so obvious now! Lord be praised!
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“Your flamethrower is more effective the closer you are to your target!”
Hence the long silence: they were just waiting to get right up close to the release date, then FOOM, publicity!
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Chuck Testa
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@AssKicker: It goes deeper than that!
There are 3 pyros on the screen there, and the big Pyro is standing in the shape of λ!
Also there are 3 letters in “Pyro” apart from “y”, which is an upside-down λ!!
http://i.imgur.com/qm1F8.jpg
THE PYRO IS GORDON FREEMAN
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It’s not a hat. It’s TWO hats.
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@VelvetFistIronGlove
MY GOD, YOU ARE A GENIUS!
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See, I wish they would just do something like this Half Life related. It could even just be a “TOP SECRET” page with a Half Life logo, I don’t care; but please, just let me know you’re working on something to do with it, I don’t need anything more than that at this point.
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I’d love them to just release it randomly one day. Everyone would totally lose their shit.
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This would be my preffered method of release to.
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@chris Haha! That’s exactly what they should do.
Like, “Hey guys, you know how you keep asking about HL3? Well, we just made it available on Steam for download”.
1 minute later
“We apologize but our servers appear to be on fire.”
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All this announcement makes me want to do is know about Half-Life 3 more now. With the constant flow of additions to TF2, this just feels like Valve are taunting us.
“Oh, you want to know about Half-Life 3? Well, we’re working of TF2. Here’s a vague, nondescript hint that will lead you on a wild-goose chase.”
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I’m guessing it’s something DOTA2 related.
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As I’m fairly sure DOTA2 is its own game and not part of TF2, you’d probably be wrong
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Prolly shoes or gloves.
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Revolutionize EVERYTHING!
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Again!
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10th class
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The secret is that TF2 never existed, and you haven’t been playing it, and that’s not even a computer; it’s a metaphor for your childhood.
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That’s like… deep, man.
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I think this new project will either be good or bad. Perhaps average.
The thing is TF2 has a very very good player base although its an old game, the guys are very succesful on pretty much everything TF2 related. I play thos game once in every month for an hour probably but this does not change the fact that the game is a great game.
This said, please take a screenshot of this post as I pretty much have the best idea what the new project will be and I would love to be proven right in the near future.
The New Project will be new maps and game modes where there will be more than 2 factions fighting each other. There will be 3 factions. There will be game modes that all three will be able to fight in one single game with each other. All these factions will have a unique name and you will only be registered to 1 faction with one account. Every factions scouts and soldiers will have different looks as well. Once you are registered with lets say the yellow team, you will always fight for the yellow team.
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That would be epic!
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Good, bad, or average, eh? Such a gambling man.
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Who cares? (grumpy today because there’s yet another indie event in “teh london” and I’m “oop north”, sorry about that).
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You took the time to write that on the internet.
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@zoombapup…
The answer is: You do.
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It’s a pack consisting of a hat and a map.
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Or a hat which is both a hat and a map. Or the other way around.
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But is it a map folded to make a hat, or a hat with a map drawn on it? THE INTERNET DEMANDS ANSWERS.
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Pfft. a hat with a map drawn on it would be stupid. The world is flat, not hat shaped.
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Depends if it’s a hat made out of a turtle.
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…”Depends if it’s a hat made out of a turtle.”
With four elephants stood on top?
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A choice between two genders for every class?
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Registered to post this^
Female character choices are long overdue.
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It would be cool to have THONGS for female characters as they have HATS for male characters.
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No it wouldn’t iARDAs.
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I will accept nothing less than thirteen genders.
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This. Being able to choose a gender should have been in TF2 a long time ago. Probably not going to happen, though. Most likely it’s a new game mode and/or a new class (another male).
Sausage fest. :D
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This would be superb – shamefully absent (although not shameful by the game industry’s spectacular low standards for this sort of thing), and I’m sure female characters would look superb in game. TF2 is dead and broken to me now, but it’d still be good to see.
And iARDAs? No.
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Well I am not convinced the pyro is a girl, maybe a tranny?
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I’m interested in Meet the Pyro, and that’s it. I never thought you could have too much content, but TF2 proved me wrong. Used to love it to death, but now when I try to play I just see a mess of colour and particle effects.
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You are just jealous because you don’t have a particle effect :)
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How do you know if you have a particle effect anyway? Do the particles take up half your screen?
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You should play Dungeon Defenders. I guarantee that TF2 will look grimdark after that.
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@maurizi0: Well, I have a service medal, so I’m not overly bothered :)
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You know what? I don’t even care anymore. Like the commenter above me, i used to love it, but now it has lost it’s brilliant art direction in favor of randomness and gained the (bleh) “freetoplay” aspect, which means either playing TF2 for ten hours a day or unacceptable monetary expenses if you want to get any new stuff.
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I’m sorry but you have no clue what you are talking about.
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If you’re playing TF2 solely to get the new stuff, you’re doing it wrong.
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the rate of getting an item didnt change when it was made free…
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>she
no
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Actually, yes.
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No, not really.
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But maybe yes?
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I maintain that if the pyro is female, she’s pinheaded, asbestos-scarred, dumpy, waddling and psychotic.
Or has no skull in order to fit into that gasmask.
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It’s a well-established unverified claim that the pyro is an alien. You think its mask is muffling its words? That’s just the way it talks.
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Its a new game mode, we got this inside info some time ago.
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We did?
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Remember how stripped down TF2 used to be? TF2 is the biggest piece of evidence supporting subtractive design there is (in that it hasn’t been improved by additions), so I hope it’s something subtractive.
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Just because you don’t like the way TF2 has changed doesn’t make your personal opinion absolute. The vast majority of TF2 players enjoys most things Valve has done with the game over the years. Considering how old the game is, Team Fortress 2 is an phenomenon and unique in every possible way. You will have a hard time thinking of any other (excluding other Valve games or mods like CS or Garrys Mod, even HL2:Deathmatch is fairly alive still) multiplayer FPS that is not only alive after 5 years running, but is thriving.
If the vocal minority where actually serious about what they claim, and weren’t just a bunch of bitching hipsters, you would see much more active vanilla servers, but there are basically non. All it takes is a couple of simple server commands to ban hats and weapons from a server, and actively reverting the game to what it was on launch. But people don’t want that, they want silly hats, they want customization, they want new weapons to play around with, they want to name their items, they want to trade those items for other items, they want to put different colors on hats.
But the fact there aren’t any vanilla servers, considering how easy it is to set them up, leads me to believe there is no demand for this sort of thing. Because if there were, people would just make it. This is how it has always been with Valve games. If people want something, they just make it. Thats why every single Valve game has mod tools. And if the demand for this sort of thing was big enough, Valve would make an official vanilla client. But the truth is, there simply is no demand for it. End of story.
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Wow jees oh, I’m not that bothered, It was just an observation, genuinely didn’t intend to/expect to upset anyone with that one, I don’t pay enough attention to tf2 to know that this was a hot button issue, I would suggest though that if there’s no demand for vanilla tf2 it’s because the people who liked it moved on when it changed, as I did imo,imo :D.
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You were bothered enough to make a post about how Team Fortress 2 is a prime example for how adding free content and fan support over a span of 5 years is hurting (in your opinion) a game, which couldn’t be farther from the truth.
“I would suggest though that if there’s no demand for vanilla tf2 it’s because the people who liked it moved on when it changed, as I did”
If those people didn’t even know you could mod servers in TF2, or didn’t even take the little effort it takes to mod a server to the way they want to play the game, then there was no value lost to the community.
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@ Zeroskill: Your points are a little hyperbolic, but you are essentially correct. Vanilla tf2 is entirely possible, though I would like an official server option, and to have a tag for listing in the server browser. There’s no real reason not to make it easier to keep everyone happy, and then everyone who stopped playing can stop their whining already. I’d certainly use the option, even though I still actively play. I’m a fan of modern tf2, but it is nice to go back to vanilla now and then. (such as during item server downtime.) It’s beautifully simple.
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@zeroskill
I was like you once, but then I realised most of the weapons and hats weren’t really important and didn’t improve my experience, they just made it different.
But I guess I must be wrong then, so sayeth the VAST MAJORITY (lol). The maps were good but they’ve strayed further and further from the original theme. Suddenly people who have a problem with that are of “no value” because they can’t set up a server and the “vanilla” servers that people tell them to play on are just unmodded, no-plugin servers that are the naysayer’s calling card.
It’s as though you can’t be critical of a game you enjoy without the fanboys jumping down your throat.
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@Stupoider Stop putting things out of context.
“I was like you once, but then I realised most of the weapons and hats weren’t really important and didn’t improve my experience, they just made it different.”
I never said the weapons are “important” and I don’t like vanilla weapons or looks. In fact I mostly only play vanilla weapons in Team Fortress 2 because they are the most powerful.
“Suddenly people who have a problem with that are of “no value” ”
Again, I never said such a thing. What I said, is that people that leave the game and all they do is rant about how the glorious artstyle has been ruined by evil Valve instead of doing something about it, like organizing a community of players that enjoy playing the game in vanilla, or writing about it in the official forums where their voices will actually be heard by people that have a say in things, have in fact, no value to THE COMMUNITY. Stop putting things out of context.
“It’s as though you can’t be critical of a game”
Thats what the active community of the game has been doing for 5 years, but not in an RPS comment section about an upcoming patch where it doesn’t serve the slightest purpose other then to aggravate people.
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A few things:
-”Vanilla Servers” does not refer to servers which do not allow unlocks but rather to servers which are unmodded and use the default settings for things like respawn times and maximum player counts.
-While I agree a more minimalised TF2 would be nice, the solution is not to simply remove the unlocks. TF2 without unlocks has a lot of problems as well, and a lot of the unlocks have done the game lot of good. A better solution is to pick out the good ideas produced over the years and redesign the class weapons to encompass them while having the freedom to leave out the problematic or largely unnecessary stuff to create a more defined version of TF2.
-There have been attempts to create modded servers for this purpose, the problem is that Valve aren’t really supporting this sort of thing so said servers are frequently broken when new patches come along. The majority of servers will inevitably just follow what Valve does regardless of whether it was a good move or not.
-Generally discussions that concern something new coming to TF2 will invariably invite these kind of discussions that concern what a lot of people want Valve to do with regards of TF2. It would certainly be ironic if this new secret project turned out to be some manner of cut down version of the game.
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“There have been attempts to create modded servers for this purpose, the problem is that Valve aren’t really supporting this sort of thing so said servers are frequently broken when new patches come along.”
Well there isn’t really anything Valve could do there, not as far as I know of. It really has always been like this, when a new client version is released, modders have to update their files to the newest version of the client. Even something like WoW interface mods always had to bring a new version. I understand how tedious this is considering how often Valve updates.
A thing that is in Dota 2 right now though, allows you to roll back one update, they did that for tournament purposes. This might be something to suggest, at least it would give modders time to adjust their files to the newest build while still being able to run their server files, which would not support the newest changes of a specific update though.
Unless they really adopt a mod into the original game there is nothing they could do, at least not as far as I know of (if there is a way to prevent mods from braking when the client is updated, let them know!), which I imagine will not happen, considering there are craploads of mods out there. We will see that though with Gungame for CS. Maybe they plan something like this for TF2 in the future?
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It is gonna be a new game mode and it will be called PDM for Pyro Deathmatch. It is a regular DM that features only pyro.
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So pretty much Pyrumo then: http://www.gamebanana.com/tf2/maps/86318
(A map made by our old TF2 server admin, and the buggiest thing in existence :p)
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DotA TF2.
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So Super Monday Night Combat? That would be a bit low of Valve seems how they are supporting them.
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Shame, I was hoping Valve would keep the Pyro in the dark.
It’s fun discussing the possible identities of the Pyro with random strangers. The most popular guesses are Abraham Lincoln and Miss Pauling. Either one of those might be the Pyro. (There are so many discontinuities about Abraham Lincoln’s death that it is hard to find out what happened.)
Or, Valve might have a bigger secret up their sleeve. Perhaps the unknown recipient in Mr. Mann’s will may be revealed. Maybe we will finally discover the secret of the missing Not Dying Machine, or the dramatic conclusion of the war between the two brothers. Maybe we will see the motives behind Ellen and her involvement with Team Fortress Industries. Saxton Hale and Mann Co’s partnership with TF Industries may be clarified. Hell, maybe Erasmus can make a comeback and reveal a secret that we’ve never seen before.
We can never know until the entire secret is revealed. Personally, I find it odd that my most hated class (the Pyro) is the key to unlocking some of the mysteries.
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I’m hoping it’s just a 5 minute video of the Pyro mumbling from behind the mask, totally incomprehensible.
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If Valve are smart, that video is going to contain a whole lot of teasing as to what’s under the mask, but they’re not going to actually reveal anything.
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Maybe a single player and co-op campaign. You’d go through a different story and campaign depending on which class you chose, or which class the host is. I also like iARDA’s guess. That would be awesome.
I registered to post this. Do you have any idea what a horrendous pain in the ass it is to register with a phone on this site. May wanna look into that.
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Can you imagine the erruption of nerd rage when people found out that Valve had been working on a single player TF2 instead of a Half-Life sequel? It would be delicious.
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New game type. I think it’s gonna be a horde/survival style thing vs robotic versions of the classes.
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It is either an RTS mode or a character who is actually a hat.
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Ahahaha had a laugh on the cahracter who is actually a hat.
Could be. since southpark has Towelie, a junkie podhead who is a Towel, a character that is engineered as a HAT for TF2 does not suprise me.
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TF2 RTS.
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Registered just to say: It’s robots. There are so many hints towards it hidden in Foundry if you no-clip around a bit.
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We already have robots in TF2.
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I am a robot. Beep. Boop. Beep.
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All the classes will be condensed into a theoretical physicist with weapons training, all maps are an Arctic and alien wasteland and the engine and modding tools are overhauled to a modern standard. And it’s now called Half-LIfe 3.
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Maybe it’s presents for all of us?
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New Mode: Capture the Payload Point.
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It’s several hats!
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In my heart of hearts the best thing that Valve could ever do with TF2 would be to do a Capcom style versus game with the fellas at Uber Entertainment and make TF2XMNC SUPER GUN FIGHT MILLENIUM 2011 BATTLE. Best game ever.
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A green team.
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It’s a gun, isn’t it?
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Valve will be shutting down Steam so that its entire workforce can concentrate on making hats.
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Jetpacks. Possibly shaped like hats.
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as they said also something about the Saxxy Awards.. I’m guessing it is just some tools for making machinimia easier.
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Stokes fire.
Emp grenade for engies
Medics can infect
Bunny hoping to be written in
Breakable walls and demos to have det packs…
Oh and scouts to have calthrops of course
Have I missed anything? :D
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Survival mode?
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I’ve imagined them creating another team, a team of bad guys pulled from 50′s pulp that the current classes have been training to fight. A mad scientist type, an alien, a robot, a ninja–all equivalents of the current classes but with an evil bent.
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Maybe they’ll turn off the censoring in the German version.
I’m sure that won’t happen.
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I think they’re going to start charging people for it again.
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“she so deserves”
Well played.
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Source FilmMaker, definitely Source FilmMaker.
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1)pyro is a man
2)making female versions of the character would be complete waste of time. It’s like having female versions of batman, superman, spiderman…. yeah, I know that spidergirl, supergirl and batgirl exist, and that’s actually the point, because nobody gives a shit about them
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