Team Fortress 2 Fixes a 17-Year-Old Bug With BLU Scout's Pants

What can a person do in 17 years? In that time, you could go from being born to graduating high school, or from starting college to becoming a seasoned professional in your mid-thirties. You can theoretically become a millionaire, cross the entire world on foot more than once, become a parent to over a dozen children, or, if you happen to work at Valve, you might finally fix a bug in Team Fortress 2 that's been around since its launch in October 2007.

On October 24, exactly 17 years and 2 weeks after TF2's launch, the developers launched a minor update to the progenitor of the hero shooter genre, fixing some small bugs and introducing slight tweaks to the in-game maps.

Among the patch notes, one particular change caught the community's attention, for it revealed that the BLU Scout's 3D model had the incorrect pants color for the entire duration of the game's existence, and what many had assumed was a simple design choice turned out to be a bug that the update in question finally addressed.

Here's a comparison shot demonstrating Scout's pants before and after the update:

Unlike many bugs typically found in video games, this particular one has never been seen as such, and 99.9% of players were perfectly satisfied with only the character's shirt changing colors depending on the player's team.

Given this, it's no surprise that the game's community, still alive and active 17 years later, was puzzled by the update, wondering why this issue was fixed more than a decade and a half later and questioning how this mishap occurred in the first place. The second question was answered by Twitter user @heavyfortres, who explained that, supposedly, someone simply forgot to turn on the blue pants layer in the Photoshop file for the Scout's textures, and no one revisited it until now.

Ironically, despite the fix's apparent insignificance, it has somehow become one of the most discussed TF2 updates since 2017's Jungle Inferno, second perhaps only to the updates Valve introduced earlier this year, which addressed the issue of cheaters and bots in the game's lobbies and purged many of them alongside their Steam accounts.

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