It took 17 years, but Valve has finally fixed the Scout’s pants as part of an update for Teamfort 2 which came out on Thursday. The solution was widely celebrated by the TF2 community, who have quietly suffered for years from having wrong colored pants while playing as the BLU Scout.
Teamfort 2The cast of characters has a RED or BLUE color scheme. On the RED side, the characters’ pants are red, brown, or somewhere in between. On the BLU side, with the exception of Scout from the past 17 years, the characters’ pants are shades of blue or gray. As of Thursday’s update, the BLU side now features a consistent and on-brand blue shade from the waist down.
“Finally they enabled that Photoshop layer,” another player explained.
A video of Team Fortress YouTuber shounic posted in 2023 explained how the Scout’s bugged bottoms came about. It appears to have been an oversight regarding a PhotoShop layer (hence the Reddit comment) that gave the BLU Scout the same pants as the RED Scout.
As Shounic notes, many official screenshots, promotional materials, comics, and even in-game show BLU Scout wearing blue-colored pants, but only in the PlayStation 3 version of Teamfort 2included The Orange Box collection. The Steam version has had the wrong pants this whole time. Even Valve’s Meet the spy video from 2009 was wrong.
However, the story of BLU Scout’s pants is not over yet. Like many Teamfort 2 players have noticed that other cosmetics for BLU Scout are still the wrong color. The Blizzard Britches and Mann vs. Machine robot skins for the BLU Scout have not yet been fixed. We may have to wait another seventeen years TF2 is completely, truly playable.
It’s not clear why Valve ultimately decided to update the Scout’s pants and how much development effort was required. But Polygon has reached out to Valve for comment and will update when the developer responds.