Some gamers may not care about all the other Steam Workshop items for Team Fortress 2 other than maps. Valve has recognized the need for making it easier to find and share maps, so there's a new way to find, play and get feedback on these custom creations.
Over on the official Teamfortress website there's a brief news post to explain how Valve has implemented a Maps Workshop for Team Fortress 2. The new feature will make it easier to get the maps out there that you build, get feedback on maps that you need help improving and find maps of a specific kind to help improve your gameplay experience.
The post keeps it brief, mentioning...
“The Maps Workshop Beta is an in-development one-stop hub where mapmakers can instantly upload and get feedback on their maps. Simply head over to the in-game Workshop tool and click on the new Maps button.”
So why does this feature exist? Well, the whole point is to help gamers and map makers curate the content in the Steam Workshop to show only the maps in Team Fortress 2 for easier navigation.
Some of you might be thinking “Isn't it easy to just select the map tag?” well, that's why they made the new Maps Workshop beta, so that you don't get anything else filtered in except for the Team Fortress 2 maps.
Personally, I've never had any problems navigating the Steam Workshop. I think it's setup just about perfect and barring a few times where the search results turned up things I wasn't exactly looking for, it serves its purpose quite well in most games.
In something like Garry's Mod where there are a lot of miscellaneous items thrown up on the Workshop page, it's quite easy to just filter out the noise with a few clicks on the tags and then find exactly what you're looking for. But then again some users may want a faster way to only deal with the map making aspects of Team Fortress 2 without any noise whatsoever.
In fact, the new page for maps in the game also has additional tag refinements so you can filter out maps per class, per game mode or per weapon. You can literally find a specific map to suit the tastes of your playing preference.
So if you only want a night stage for Demoman playing Special Delivery, it's entirely possible to limit the search field to just that with the new page for custom maps.
I'm still kind of shocked that Team Fortress 2 is as popular as it is even though it's been out for as long as it has. Then again, in addition to Valve throwing out plenty of free upgrades and updates for the game and making it free-to-play, they've also made it a prime time target for short films and continued gaming culture thanks to the easy integration into tools like the Source Filmmaker. That's not to mention that Team Fortress 2 is always a favorite game used by auteurs in the annual Saxxy Awards.
You can check out the new page for the maps by heading on over to the official Steam Workshop page.
