Team Fortress 2 'Friendship' Not a Game Mode

The recent Team Fortress 2 update has done more than just fix bugs, glitches and tweak the game. A very mysterious addition to the title was a brand-new set of audio lines for the announcer. As we saw yesterday, the announcements make several references to friendship, betrayal and mercenaries but, with no actual details from Valve, all we could do is speculate. Some believed this would be a brand-new game mod, but those hopes were ruined today by Valve, which did so by not actually telling us anything about what the new change would be.

Valve's Robin Walker said that, “We've got something coming, but it's not a new game mode. The key to understanding the new sound files is to figure out who's hearing them in-game, and who isn't. [...] There's something about the way they're used in-game that's meaningful.” So everyone that has ever heard these announcements needs to step forward and detail the event down to the smallest grain of sand. Another somewhat useful piece of information was given by Walker, and that was that, “So far, we haven't seen anyone on the various forums out there who's figured it out.”

That means that we need to take our speculation-list and crosscheck it against every opinion that has already been voiced. This way, we can cross off all the wrong ones, and hopefully get closer to the truth. On the official Valve forums, a special “detective” thread for this has already emerged and a very detailed account of one “betrayal” encounter has been documented by the user eyeone.

“Second time happened just now, while playing a small game at 2am (insomniacs ftw). Here's all the info I can give:

“I'm on red as a soldier, along with a spy and sniper (3) vs 4 people on their team. I get the mission begins notices until I get to where the 'mission begins in ten seconds' message should be, but get the 'friendship ends in ten seconds' message instead. As the round starts, one of their team mates joins red, he was also playing soldier. All of my teammates are on my friends list, none of my opponents are. Also, something else – I have a demo of the match, played it back, the message was replaced with the original.”