There’s a rumor that Team Fortress 3 is in active development and will debut as a free-to-play game.
Once upon a time, Team Fortress 2 was the best arena shooter in town. Although not quite the same as Overwatch's heroes, each of Team Fortress's classes had unique characteristics that could counter other classes and lead your team to victory.
It's also well over a decade old and long since suspected of falling prey to Valve's inability to count to three. Every Valve game gets a single sequel, and then that's it.
Or maybe not. A new rumor is floating around that says Valve is working on a sequel to Team Fortress 2 and might finally break the curse that prevents the company from making a third sequel.
The rumor comes from 4chan, the anonymous messaging board, so take it with a pretty hefty grain of salt. There have been plenty of 4chan rumors that have turned out to be true, but even more have turned out to be anonymous posters looking to troll the internet, and Team Fortress 3 would definitely fool a lot of people wishing against all possibility that it was true.
According to the poster, TF3 would mostly be a Source 2 port of Team Fortress 2, which still uses the original Source engine (that's the one that powered Half-Life 2). Source 2 is used in Dota2, Dota Underlords, and Artifact, and from the sounds of it, this move is mostly to make it easier to keep Team Fortress up to date.
When Team Fortress 3 releases, the plan is to encourage all players to move over to the new game. All items will carry over from Team Fortress 2 accounts (other than badges and weapons), and 75% of TF2 servers are expected to be converted to play Team Fortress 3.
TF2 will receive one more major update before TF3 releases which will set the stage for the new game's arrival. After that, TF2 will be placed on life support and just receive bug fix updates and minor reworks.
As for Team Fortress 3, the game is expected to release as a free-to-play game with 3 new classes at launch as well as 3 more planned for later release. There will be a major rework of classes and game mechanics too, along with various smaller improvements.
And who knows? If Valve is finally able to pump Team Fortress 3 out then maybe the curse will be lifted and we’ll finally get Half-Life 3.