Help Test Team Fortress 2 Changes

Valve has been introducing a steady stream of changes into its competitive first-person shooter ever since launch, but the just-opened TF2 public beta may foreshadow even deeper changes coming to the game.

The beta is open to all TF2 owners through Steam. It offers a couple of tweaks for testing right away, including variants where everyone has 25% less health and does 25% less damage. The dev team plans on introducing more drastic changes through the beta first, like doubled global health and significant alterations to the underlying technology.

Team Fortress 2 has been run from Valve's side more like an MMO than a traditional non-subscription game, so why not add something like this public test realm analog? Managing director Gabe Newell has been very vocal for a long time about how he thinks that the future of games -- and particularly PC games -- is in the service end of the business, and this is yet another manifestation of that philosophy.