Valve finally fixed a Team Fortress 2 bug 17 years after launch

It might not be a huge performance fix, but Valve made an impactful change in the latest Team Fortress 2 update: Making sure Scout put on the correct pants.

Buried a bit in the latest update’s patch notes, released on Thursday, is a bullet point that says, “Fixed BLU Scout using the incorrect team color pants.” This might not seem like a big deal, but Scout on the BLU team has been wearing the wrong pants for 17 years.

The update was spotted by user @heavyfortres on X (formerly Twitter), who wrote, “They changed a character design 17 years later! What!”

If you look closely at the original BLU Scout’s pants, they’re the same shade of brown that the RED Scout wears. It’s not immersion breaking, but it does look off. The new pants are more gray than brown, matching the cooler tone of his bright blue shirt.

THEY MADE BLU SCOUT’S PANTS BLUE

THEY CHANGED A CHARACTER DESIGN 17 YEARS LATER WHAT pic.twitter.com/WFPdYvwYzx

— heavy team fortres 2 (@heavyfortres) October 24, 2024

Surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly considering Team Fortress 2‘s long-running and passionate fandom), this change has been met with mixed reviews. While the pants are now “correct,” many of the cosmetics released over the years for the free-to-play first-person shooter now don’t match, as some Redditors have noticed.

Team Fortress 2 YouTuber Shounic released a video two years ago noticing the Scout’s pants were the wrong color and breaking down every instance where they were gray or brown. Valve couldn’t even keep the colors straight in non-game materials like comics and the “Meet the Team” videos. Shounic released a follow-up today on the change, and noticedthat the pants are only available on the default texture and one or two other cosmetics. So outfits that go over the pants are still brown, and clash with the gray pants under it. Shounic called it “the strangest day in TF2 history.”