It took 17 years, but Valve has finally fixed the Scout’s pants as part of an update for Team Fortress 2 that rolled out Thursday. The fix has been widely celebrated by the TF2 community, which has quietly suffered with incorrectly colored trousers for years while playing as the BLU Scout.
Team Fortress 2’s cast of characters sport a RED or BLU color scheme. On the RED side, characters’ pants are red, brown, or somewhere in between. On the BLU side, with the exception of the Scout for the past 17 years, characters’ pants are shades of blue or gray. As of Thursday’s update, the BLU side now enjoys a consistent and on-brand blue hue from the waist down.
Valve addressed the momentous fix with minimal fanfare. “Fixed BLU Scout using the incorrect team color pants,” the developer wrote in an post dated Oct. 24. But the patched pants were set upon with appropriate levels of enthusiasm by Team Fortress 2 players. “It finally happened. The game is playable again!” wrote a player on the TF2 subreddit. “After 17 years in development it was worth the wait,” said another.
“Finally, they turned on that photoshop layer,” explained another player.
A video from Team Fortress YouTuber shounic posted in 2023 explained how the Scout’s bugged-out bottoms may have come to be. It appears to have been an oversight related to a PhotoShop layer (hence the Reddit comment) that gave the BLU Scout the same pants as the RED Scout.
As shounic points out, BLU Scout has been shown wearing blue-colored pants in plenty of official screenshots, promotional materials, comics, and even in-game, but only in the PlayStation 3 version of Team Fortress 2, included in The Orange Box collection. The Steam version has had the wrong pants this whole time. Hell, even Valve’s Meet the Spy video from 2009 got it wrong.
The saga of BLU Scout’s slacks isn’t over, though. As many Team Fortress 2 players have pointed out, other cosmetics for BLU Scout still have the wrong color. The Blizzard Britches and Mann vs. Machine robot skin for the BLU Scout haven’t yet been fixed. We may be in for another 17-year wait until TF2 is fully, truly playable.
It’s not clear why Valve finally decided to update the Scout’s pants, and how much development effort was required to pull this off. But Polygon has reached out to Valve for comment and will update when the developer responds.
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