Team Fortress 2 Adding A Robot Faction

Popular free to play, first person shooter Team Fortress 2 will be adding robots as the game’s third faction. The new co-operative mode with allow five players to form a group and take on hordes of very angry robots. Game developer Valve released more information on Monday, as a follow up to the mysterious Grey Mann hints given out over the weekend. The new robot faction will join the game on August 15, 2012 as part of the next update.

One of the remarkable features of online gaming is the wonderful synergy between the players and the game developers when it comes to ferreting out the game’s secrets. Valve spent the weekend giving out hints about the upcoming additions to Team Fortress 2 and left it to the players to solve the mystery.

The hints were spread out across the Team Fortress website, the game’s online comic, and peppered in posts on the Valvearg chat. Players worked furiously all weekend to decipher the clues and squeeze as much information as they could out of whatever meager offerings Valve was willing to share with them.

Team Fortress player and chat poster Iamjethro helped reveal the clues, with this ARG explaining how the hints were being unravelled:

“Someone found out by equipping an item that was not supposed to be equippable and high fiving someone, the person you high fived would receive a secret message in the form of a joke. The jokes turned out to be hidden hex code, which then revealed nine things. Eight of them just revealed a word, but the nineth one revealed a zip with a password lock (a Keepass thing). Using the words as a PDP code list somethignsomthingsomething(I’m not exactly sure here), people found a link inside linking to tf2.com which turned out to be a crafting recipe in game. Crafting all the items together caused a GAME wide message, linking the comic.”

If you have never played Team Fortress 2, now you have had a taste of the wonderful player community that exists as part of the Valvearg.com chat, and you have had a first hand example of how an ARG works. To find out more and enjoy a terrific FPS, give Team Fortress 2 a try. Of course, if you are already playing Team Fortress 2, feel free to add a comment here on Inquisitr.com and update our readers on all the latest news about the new robot team.