“Even though most clues pointed towards EA, we weren't sure since they would never confirm it.'īoth Nilsen and Francis had been talking with EA customer service representatives through a long Twitter direct message thread. In late April, Francis and Nilsen started “reaching out to every Valve and EA employee, every customer service department we could, since we didn't know exactly who was running the servers,” Nilsen told me. Since it was technically online still, just not in an optimal state, I knew all hope wasn't lost.'įrom that sliver of hope, Nilsen, Francis, and other members of the PS3 TF2 community embarked on a quest to get someone to listen to their pleas. 'I just had a random thought to boot the game up around Easter, I expected it to be shut down,' he said. In April, though, Nilsen and others in the Discord thought the PS3 game might not be coming back. While the game’s PS3 servers had gone down sporadically over the years, they had always come back up. 'I met some guys through that and I think me and got really pumped up trying to fix this problem. 'The menu was modded so I found the Discord through that,' Nilsen told me over Discord.

There, he joined a fledgling community of Team Fortress 2 players who preferred the vanilla PS3 version of the game over all other versions, despite its many shortcomings. But this version of the game wasn't dead, as Nilsen would soon find out after joining the Discord server linked in the lobby of the server menu. Unlike its Xbox 360 cousin, the PS3 version of TF2 seemed practically dead on arrival in 2007, let alone 12 years later. In April, Nilsen found he could still connect to the server and mess with his settings, but he couldn't actually play.

While the PC version receives updates from Valve to this day, the PS3 version of the game hasn't received any official updates, patches, or new content since it first came out. That’s because Nilsen had been playing the PS3 version of Team Fortress 2, a game that has been long neglected by Valve and server host EA since its 2007 launch.

He booted up the game in April of 2019, hoping to get into the habit of erecting dispensers once again. Still, the class-based charm and powerful combo of the heavy/medic uber-charge eventually convinced him to come back. He's spent hundreds of hours running between rooftops as the scout in 2Fort and dominating points on Dustbowl as a demoman since he picked up the quirky team shooter in 2011.Īfter playing consistently for five years, Nilsen took a break in 2016 to focus on other things. Team Fortress 2 was Lars Nilsen's favorite game.

Team fortress 2 offline mode