Valve giveth, and Valve taketh away: Team Fortress 2's BLU Scout is once again wearing the 'wrong' pants after a 17 years-in-the-making fix was reversed a day later
Signs of life from Team Fortress 2 are rare and precious these days, so when Valve updated the in-game model of the Scout, fixing a visual bug that's existed since TF2's release in 2007, we were paying attention. But as reported by YouTuber shounic, the visual tweak was not to last: A follow-up patch has reverted the BLU Scout's pants to their original, incorrect khaki from a smart, team-appropriate navy.
"Reverted BLU Scout pants fix because it conflicts with too many existing cosmetics," read the characteristically terse patch notes. Shounic points out in another video that cosmetics which change Scout's pants or shoes remain brown, with ones that only swap out part of the model (like the Crazy Legs) resulting in a tacky, half-navy, half-khaki ensemble with the BLU Scout's short-lived new threads.
A full fix would thus require Valve to modify all of the textures on BLU Scout's trouser-based cosmetics. It's far from an impossible task for the infinitely wealthy studio, but the main complication is how many official cosmetics were created by modders on the Steam Workshop, making this a headache that TF2's skeleton crew may not want to bother with.
Shounic uploaded an explainer video on the subject last year: All the classes in TF2 have brown pants on RED team, and navy pants on BLU team—except the scout, who sports the same color of sporty capris on either side. In the Photoshop files for the BLU Scout's textures, his correct pants are present on their own, separate layer. Valve's artists presumably just forgot to enable their visibility when exporting the textures into the game.
The reaction among TF2 players is a hyperbolic, mostly playful despair over Valve's takesies-backsies. "It's so over," declared user SuperfeliGT on the TF2 subreddit, while Pyropian08 proposed a "public execution" of the navy pant-clashing Corpse Carrier cosmetic. Most of this seems to be in good fun, though Pyropian08's post and others do seem to be working out some sincerely-felt grievances over TF2's cosmetic environment. I'm hoping to god that user DaMikel's proposed "SaveTFBLU" movement is just a bit—this game already has enough grassroots movements going on.
I do wonder if this is the last we'll hear of the BLU Scout's blue pants—it's not inconceivable that Valve returns at a later date with retextured cosmetics to go with the pants. The overarching Scout pant situation isn't uncommon in games, glitches or errors being taken as developer intent or otherwise unnoticed by the player base. I'm reminded of the quests broken at Elden Ring's launch that we all assumed were working as intended, or the way Conrad Verner always assumed you threatened him with a gun in Mass Effect 1 when you find him again in ME2.