Update: TF2 War Event Includes Claymores And... Crafting? Also Free Weekend!

There are plenty of games wherein one could reasonably expect to find a crafting section. MMOs are a good one - World of Warcraft's professions have had me staying up farming reagents many an otherwise-productive night. Console RPGs are another good one, since you can see plenty of equips but only so many shops.

But if you'd told me when the game first came out that Team Fortress 2 would be getting an item-crafting system, I'd have looked at you like you were crazy. (And then both our conversations would be cut short by an extremely cheap critrocket.) But you would have turned out not crazy! Since, as part of the ongoing WAR! update, Valve is introducing a menu for smelting down useless or excess weapons to craft new ones.

The system sounds as though it will fit quite well in the standard structure of drops that's still addicting players. One of the most common complaints after the move to a randomized system of weapon giveaways was that even the most dedicated players can be left with a ton of useless Medic weapons when their favorite class is Spy. Well, those gamers can finally spend less time complaining about it in Valve's forums and more time actually earning things to craft their own Dead Ringers. There will also be a blueprint requirement for any item you'd want to make (and the page above hints that some blueprints will drop such that dedicated crafters can actually get ahold of certain items before they're available on their own), but it's as yet unclear whether some of the some schematics can simply be worked out through trial-and-error or looking them up online, in Diablo's Horadric fashion, or whether even the most basic hat will still require some sort of wait for its blueprint to drop.

In addition to the giddy grittiness of actually forming weapons from (almost) nothing, a few more updates have hit that make the WAR! Event all the more juicy. As of yesterday, we've seen the first weapon upgrades for both the Soldier and Demoman, which include a precision rocket launcher for one and a haunted claymore and buckler for the other.

Finally, if you're eager to get a feel for what Team Fortress 2 has to offer during one of its most hectic weeks ever, you're in luck! Starting Thursday, the game is getting another of its free-to-play weekends. So if you want a weekend-long demo of one of the most popular class-based shooters out there, start preloading! And, if my math is right, we should know by then which of the two classes will have won, through player efforts, the final 'bonus' weapon...