To grow distant. To watch the things you love leave you. To deal with the loss of what you once had. It hurts. To see friends grow distant. To know that the bond you shared is suddenly gone and you don’t even know when it started to slip away.

For me, I have seen friends come and go. The friends I had in elementary school aren’t here. The friends I had in middle school are distant. Will the friends I have now fade too one day?

It feels that most things that I have considered near to who I was always have faded away. Not just my friends, but games and music have faded over time, too. Nothing exemplifies that better than one of my former favorite games: Team Fortress 2.

After releasing 15 years ago, this game is finally dying. Valve, the studio behind the game, no longer seems to care about, what I’d call, a perfect game. So, in celebration of 15 years, why is it considered to be near perfection by so many people?

TF2 is a multiplayer, first-person, class-based shooter in which your main goals consist of defending or attacking points, pushing or preventing the pushing of a payload, capturing enemy intelligence like capture the flag, and a few more modes.

The classes of TF2 are what make the game. It’s not just their style of gameplay that drives the game into being beloved by many, but also the rude and brash nature of their characters. All of them are heavily stereotyped and stylized so that their silhouettes and personalities are recognizable in an instant.

The style of the main game is cartoony enough to have aged peacefully and never have the game look its age, and each character has aged just as well, from Soldier, who is the proudest and most insane American patriot you could ever meet, to Heavy, who has a Ph.D. in Russian literature and loves his machine guns.

All of the Mercs who make up the roster of who you can play bring life into TF2’s world. The way they interact seamlessly makes them feel more real than any other game, if you ask me.

The characters make TF2 great, but the rest of the game carries it beyond being just great. The design philosophy of the game is precision and skill over anything else. Most weapons are single-fire and landing that one shot will make a fight. You either hit your shot or miss. There is no middle ground of sort of hitting—like with games that have a heavier focus on automatic guns.

That level of skill gives the game an impossibly high skill ceiling that renders even the most experienced players in a continual state of learning. That is the true beauty of TF2; no matter how much you have learned and improved, you can always still improve.

A simple example is air strafing: a skill that lets you have more control over your aerial movement. You can use it to jump around a corner or to just move slightly faster by combining more advanced movement techniques. Or you could use it to rocket jump to approach from unexpected areas and flank the enemy, or to retreat after being blasted in the air. It takes a skill that can be as simple as moving more fluidly to change the way you approach the entire game.

The game has a plethora of other movement techniques that make the game nearly impossible to master: trickstabbing, rocket jumping, bunny hopping, airblast combos, and just basic use of terrain. All of TF2’s gameplay is based on how well you can play, and it is always pushing you to become better.

Memorize the maps to know how to double jump onto terrain behind you without looking, to know where to rocket jump, or to know what corners and stairs and slopes can lead into trickstabs.

The complexity that the game presents, as well as the basics that formulate it, makes a game that is always satisfying to play, even for that one moment where you see improvement. You either succeed or fail. There is no in-between, no “you tried,” and no compensation prizes.

Yet I have grown distant from this dopamine-inducing game. In 2020, the source code for the game was leaked, and people developed bots that could instantly headshot people that infest the game even today

Even when I can find a match that is bot-free, one still joins mid-match, and I just have to hope whichever team it is on kicks it from the lobby. And even when that happens and I get my clean game, somehow the magic is gone.

The same game that I have loved for over half a decade is no longer receiving any love from me, but it is still one of the best pieces of media to ever be made. To me, it was the perfect game.