Team Fortress 2
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| Team Fortress 2 | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| VR/AR | Virtual Reality |
| Developer | Valve |
| Publisher | Valve |
| Platform | Oculus Rift (Platform) |
| Device | DK1 |
| Operating System | Windows, Linux |
| Type | Full Game |
| Genre | Shooter, Action/Adventure |
| Input Device | Keyboard, Mouse, Gamepad, Head tracking |
| Game Mode | Multi-Player |
| Release Date | October 10, 2007 (VR mode added March 19, 2013) |
| Price | Free-to-play |
| App Store | Steam, Oculus Share |
| Website | http://www.teamfortress.com/ |
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is an online multiplayer shooter developed and published by Valve. It was released on 10 October 2007 and has been free to play since 23 June 2011.[1][2] On 19 March 2013 Valve patched in a VR mode for the Oculus Rift development kit, the DK1, making the game playable with stereoscopic 3D and head tracking on the Oculus Rift platform.[3] Game Developer reported at the announcement that TF2 would be the first game to officially support the Rift.[4]
The VR mode was a port of an existing fast-paced shooter rather than a game designed for virtual reality. Valve programmer Joe Ludwig described what the team learned from it in a talk at the Game Developers Conference in March 2013, covering stereo rendering, interface placement, the interaction between mouse aiming and head tracking, and the causes of simulator sickness.[5][6] Two further patches in October and November 2013 moved VR activation into the game's video options, added VR support on Linux and improved display handling.[7][8]
Gameplay
When the game went free to play in 2011, Valve described it as an online action game and said new players would have access to training and offline practice modes before playing online.[2] Its Steam store page describes nine distinct classes.[1] The VR mode did not change the game's rules or content: according to Road to VR, Rift development kit owners could play all of the game's modes and classes in VR.[9] In VR the player's view follows head movement, while movement and shooting stay on the keyboard and mouse. Engadget compared the control scheme it tried to "playing an FPS on Nintendo's original Wii, albeit far more accurate."[10]
Development
Valve first signalled the project on 15 January 2013, when it announced two VR talks for GDC 2013: Ludwig's "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality" and Michael Abrash's "Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going)".[11] The session description said that "several people at Valve spent the past year exploring various forms of wearable computing" and that this work "included porting Team Fortress 2 to run in virtual reality goggles."[12] According to Ludwig's talk notes, most of the development was done on an nVis ST-50 head-mounted display or on foam-core and duct-tape Rift prototypes that Palmer Luckey had provided the previous fall.[6]
Valve and Oculus VR announced the mode on 18 March 2013.[13] In an interview with Engadget, Ludwig called TF2 "sort of the obvious choice" because of its large community and because its players were used to frequent updates, and said Valve had also "played a bit" with VR in Left 4 Dead and Half-Life 2 without taking either close to release.[14] He described the arrangement with Oculus as a partnership without payment, in which Oculus supplied development kits and Valve the software. He added that Valve had experimented with various hardware but that "we don't have a display that we can ship."[15] Oculus's announcement noted that TF2 was Palmer Luckey's most-played game on Steam, and cautioned that "TF2 wasn't originally designed for virtual reality and skirting around the map at super-speed in VR isn't for everyone."[13]
Ludwig told GDC attendees that getting an existing game running in VR took about a week, and that the remaining work was "the other 95%". Valve estimated that a second game on the same engine would take about a man-month.[6]
VR mode
Rendering
On the DK1, the game splits the headset's 1280x800 display into one 640x800 viewport per eye. In the Source engine this meant adding "for each eye" loops to the top-level rendering routines. Ludwig said that screen-space effects such as the burning and underwater overlays were among the largest sources of stereo bugs, and that none of them worked the first time.[6] Each eye is offset from a "middle" eye at the player's traditional viewpoint, with projection values taken from the Rift SDK, and the image is pre-warped with barrel distortion to cancel the pincushion distortion of the Rift's lenses.[6]
TF2 normally draws separate first-person weapon models that end at about the elbow. Because the Rift's larger vertical field of view and some input modes exposed their edges, VR mode instead draws the third-person player model, with its head removed, beneath the user's viewpoint.[6]
HUD and crosshair
Drawing the interface flat into both eyes would place it at optical infinity and conflict with other depth cues, so VR mode renders the HUD to a texture on a flat panel about 10 meters in front of the player and about 60 degrees wide. Menus use the same panel. Ludwig noted that these values could be changed through console variables because Valve hoped to learn better settings from players.[6] The crosshair is the exception: the game casts a ray into the world and draws the crosshair at the depth of whatever it would hit.[6]
Input modes
Head tracking adds yaw, pitch and roll to the mouse and keyboard, so VR mode has to decide how aiming, looking and moving relate. In every mode, head pitch and roll map one to one to the view; in Ludwig's words, "Any time we messed with headtracking we made people sick, so we don't do it anymore."[6] Ludwig described the schemes Valve built before release as follows:[6]
| Mode | Behavior described by Valve |
|---|---|
| 0 | Torso turned with the mouse; aim and view are the same, so the player aims with head movement |
| 1 | As mode 0, but the player moves in the torso direction and the HUD stays in front of the torso; affected by yaw drift on the development kits |
| 2 | Aim point can move vertically on screen; horizontal movement inside a 15-degree zone moves the crosshair and turns the torso by 50% |
| 3 | Default at release. Crosshair moves freely within about a third of the screen and is unaffected by head movement; pushing against the edge turns the torso |
| 4 | Mode 3, but "move forward" follows the aim point instead of the view |
Ludwig said Valve did not consider mode 3 the final answer, comparing VR at that point to first-person shooters before mouselook became standard.[6] The Oculus Rift user guide on the official Team Fortress Wiki lists the setting as the vr_moveaim_mode console variable, with further modes up to mode 7, which uses no Rift input and gives stereoscopic vision only.[16]
Comfort
Valve's GDC notes list design rules that came out of testing. Ludwig warned never to roll the player's horizon, using the game's death camera, which follows the rolling head of the character, as an example; the freeze-frame shot of the killer that follows death also caused problems for some players. Any involuntary camera motion was a problem: a bug that slid the spectator camera sideways caused discomfort for 25 to 50 percent of players, while forward motion in the direction of view was tolerated. Some core mechanics caused sickness but could not be removed for gameplay reasons, including rocket jumping, the Scout's running speed of "something like 22 miles per hour", and moving up and down stairs and ramps.[6] At Engadget's hands-on, Ludwig said that "most people have some level of discomfort after playing for 20 or so minutes the first time".[10] The Oculus Rift user guide on the Official Team Fortress Wiki advised calibrating the device for the player's eyes and stated, "You cannot 'push through' motion sickness, it just continues."[16][17]
Release
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 15 January 2013 | Valve announces its GDC 2013 talk on porting TF2 to VR[11] |
| 18 March 2013 | Valve and Oculus announce VR mode and an in-game item for Rift backers[13] |
| 19 March 2013 | Patch: "Added support for running VR mode on the Oculus Rift"; enabled with the -vr launch option in Steam[3][17] |
| By 3 April 2013 | Oculus Rift development kits have begun shipping[18] |
| 29 October 2013 | Patch: VR toggle added to Video options and -vr option removed; switching in and out of VR without quitting; full screen by default; in-game IPD calibration tool removed in favor of the Oculus configuration file; VR mode on Linux[7] |
| 21 November 2013 | Patch: resolutions other than 1280x800; cloning the main display instead of using the Rift as an extended display; sharper output; head-and-neck model fixed to remove unnecessary translation[8] |
The October 2013 notes told players to calibrate their IPD with the Oculus tool in their SDK or by running "OpenVR" from the Tools section of Steam.[7]
TF2VRH
To mark the launch, Valve made a cosmetic item styled after the Rift. Oculus said codes would go to Kickstarter backers and to customers who pre-ordered a development kit before 1 April 2013.[13][9] The Official Team Fortress Wiki lists the item as the TF2VRH, a Genuine-quality, non-tradable item for all classes released in the 19 March 2013 patch. Its "On" style glows automatically when the wearer is playing with the -vr option on real VR hardware.[19]
Related Valve VR work
On 10 May 2013 Valve released a beta of Half-Life 2 with Rift support, enabled with the -vr launch option and an opt-in beta; Ludwig called it "a bit more raw" than the TF2 implementation.[20] In June 2013 an update to the Source SDK 2013 gave mod makers the ability to add VR support to their mods.[21]
Reception
Engadget's Ben Gilbert played VR mode at Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington, on a near-final Rift development kit, as the Heavy on the Payload map Gold Rush. He reported no motion sickness and wrote that "the game is playable in VR, but it isn't designed for VR." He called the mode "a pretty strong warning that ports of existing games don't necessarily take advantage of the Rift's strengths", noted that it was the only full game playable with the Rift at the development kit's launch, and concluded that it showed "even a fast, frantic shooter like Team Fortress 2 can work with VR, even if it's a bit underwhelming."[10] Oculus's announcement quoted PC Gamer calling it "really impressive and easily the best use of 3D technology I've ever seen".[13]
At GDC 2013, Road to VR's Ben Lang watched other people try the mode and reported that its controls took some getting used to. He noted that Valve had built about eight control configurations and that Valve still had issues to fix, such as the switch to a third-person view when a player dies.[22] After the development kits shipped, TF2 was one of the most visible early Rift games: PC Gamer pointed readers to a video in which the tech site Tested played several Payload rounds, and later to a video of TF2 played with the Rift and a prototype Virtuix Omni treadmill.[18][23]
The base game holds a Metascore of 92 on PC, based on 17 critic reviews.[24]
Current status
As of October 2026 the game's Steam store page lists Windows and Linux support and does not list VR among its features.[1] Mac support, available when the game went free to play in 2011, is no longer listed; the 64-bit update of April 2024 was released for Windows and Linux only.[2][25]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Team Fortress 2 on Steam". Steam. Valve. https://store.steampowered.com/app/440/Team_Fortress_2/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Team Fortress 2 is now Free to Play". Steam. Valve. 2011-06-23. https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/5721. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Updates Released". Steam. Valve. 2013-03-19. https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/10180. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Frank Cifaldi (2013-03-18). "Valve goes VR with official Oculus Rift support". Game Developer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/valve-goes-vr-with-official-oculus-rift-support. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Joe Ludwig (2013). "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality". GDC Vault. https://gdcvault.com/play/1017798/What-We-Learned-Porting-Team. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 6.00 6.01 6.02 6.03 6.04 6.05 6.06 6.07 6.08 6.09 6.10 6.11 Joe Ludwig (2013). "Team Fortress in VR (GDC 2013 presentation slides and notes)". Valve. https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_in_VR_GDC.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 "Team Fortress 2 Update Released". Steam. Valve. 2013-10-29. https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/11746. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Team Fortress 2 Update Released". Steam. Valve. 2013-11-21. https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/11931. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Paul James (2013-03-18). "Team Fortress 2 to Get Oculus Rift 'Virtual Reality Mode' (Update: Confirmed, Video)". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/team-fortress-2-ft2-oculus-rift-virtual-reality/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Ben Gilbert (2013-03-18). "Playing an actual game with Oculus Rift: hands-on with Valve's Team Fortress 2 'VR Mode'". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-18-valve-hands-on-vr-mode.html. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Ben Gilbert (2013-01-15). "Stay seated: Valve's Team Fortress 2 ported to virtual reality". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2013-01-15-team-fortress-2-virtual-reality.html. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Phil Savage (2013-01-16). "Team Fortress 2: Valve have been developing a VR port for the last year". PC Gamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/team-fortress-2-valve-have-been-developing-a-vr-port-for-the-last-year/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 "Team Fortress 2 in the Oculus Rift". Oculus blog. Meta. 2013-03-18. https://www.meta.com/blog/team-fortress-2-in-the-oculus-rift/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ David Hinkle (2013-03-18). "Valve experimented with VR in other games, Team Fortress 2 'obvious choice' for Oculus Rift". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-18-valve-experimented-vr-other-games-team-fortress-2-oculus-rift.html. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Ben Gilbert (2013-03-18). "Valve's Joe Ludwig on the uncertain future of virtual reality and partnering with Oculus". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-18-valve-joe-ludwig-interview.html. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 "Oculus Rift User Guide". Official Team Fortress Wiki. https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Oculus_Rift_User_Guide. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 "Team Fortress 2 Oculus Rift Hat Pictured, VR Mode Patch and Wiki Page Now Live". Road to VR. 2013-03-20. https://www.roadtovr.com/tf2-oculus-rift-hat-how-to-use-vr-mode/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 Omri Petitte (2013-04-03). "See what Team Fortress 2 looks like using the Oculus Rift". PC Gamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/oculus-rift-team-fortress-2/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ "TF2VRH". Official Team Fortress Wiki. https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/TF2VRH. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Jordan Mallory (2013-05-10). "Half-Life 2 gets official Oculus Rift support". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2013-05-10-half-life-2-gets-official-oculus-rift-support.html. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Tom Senior (2013-06-27). "Source SDK 2013 update gives modders "support for virtual reality via the Oculus Rift"". PC Gamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/source-sdk-2013-gets-support-for-virtual-reality-via-the-oculus-rift/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Ben Lang (2013-03-25). "Oculus at GDC 2013 - Hands-on with Hawken, TF2, DriVR, and Epic Citadel [video"]. Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-gdc-2013-hawken-tf2-drivr-epi/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Tom Sykes (2013-04-20). "Here's Team Fortress 2 being played with an omnidirectional treadmill and Oculus Rift". PC Gamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-team-fortress-2-being-played-with-an-omnidirectional-treadmill-and-oculus-rift/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ "Team Fortress 2". Metacritic. https://www.metacritic.com/game/team-fortress-2/. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
- ↑ Samuel Willetts (2024-04-19). "New TF2 update boosts your frame rate and stops antivirus issues". PCGamesN. https://www.pcgamesn.com/team-fortress-2/update-64-bit. Retrieved 2026-10-09.