Dec 6, 2010 22:21 GMT  ·  By

Team Fortress 2, the massively popular multiplayer-only first person shooter has received a public beta stage so that its developer, Valve, can test out new systems and features, without the risk of breaking the regular game.

"As you've probably seen by now, we like to change things in Team Fortress 2. A lot. And while we're perfect most of the time, we occasionally get something wrong," revealed the company on the Team Fortress 2 blog.

According to Valve, the public beta will serve as a testing ground for lots of new things.

These include:

-Testing and tuning various class, item, and weapon changes -Testing map changes and variants -Running higher level, game-wide experiments (like doubling player health) -Testing new technologies without the risk of breaking the game

The new Team Fortress 2 public beta stage will be open to all owners of the regular game.

All they need to do is go into the Library section in the Steam service, and opt to install the Team Fortress 2 beta.

Team Fortress 2 has been getting a lot of new features lately, as Valve introduced a crafting system, as well as the ability for players to buy and sell items thanks to the Mann-conomy update.

This allowed players to upload money to their Steam wallet, and use them to get new items, including hats or weapons for use in the game.

The last big update was made before Halloween, called Scream Fortress, which added 2 new maps, and, in one of them, the addition of the first "boss" event, as players went head to head with the "Horseless Headless Horsemann".

Valve will host all of the servers for the Team Fortress 2 beta stage, so expect many changes to be made in a short amount of time.

If you want to stay in touch with all of the latest changes made to the popular first person shooter, then opt in the beta as soon as possible.