Rules in Germany prohibit advertising and shelf presentation of video games that glorify violence, or display violence.

In Half Life, the German version, everybody bled Green, and marines were robots.

In Team Fortress 2, the Gibs turn into this:

(click image for full picture)

This is basically VALVe saying, this is how exploding non human robots look in the TF2 universe - Hamburgers, springs and rubber duckies flying about.

(Note: the above picture was taken by only substituting very few of the gib models into the low violence ones - in full low violence mode there is no blood)

- - - - -

Some people actually favor these humoristic gibs to the not-so-pretty bits of bones that are usually rendered, so this is how you achieve that:

First, download and install GCFScape.

Second, locate your SteamApps directory - It should be in D:\Program Files\Steam, or at the location you installed Steam into. In that directory you should have a file named “Team Fortress 2 Low Violence.gcf”.
If such a file does not exist, try changing your steam language into German, restart Steam, and set it to English again.

Open two windows - One of GCFScape, and one of your native TF2 folder (SteamApps/username/Team Fortress 2).

It should become immediately apparent that the folder trees are very similar, and are parallel - The basic system is that when the game needs to load a file, it will first look for the file in the real folders, and if it does not exist it will try to get the file from the GCF files.

That is how we can hook the Low Violence gibs over the ones the game wants to display.

In the Low Violence GCF there are three folders under the main “tf” folder:

  • materials - This folder contains all the files that eliminated red blood.
  • particle - This folder contains non-red blood particle effects, further removing blood.
  • models - This folder contains all the funny gibs.

Each of these folders can be put under the native “tf” folder in order to achieve its effect.

Extract the files by selecting a folder, right clicking it and selecting “Extract”. Should be very native to whoever used a windows program before.

Load up the game and voila - you now have rubber ducks and license plates instead of intestines!

- - - - -

Please tell us if you succeeded in following this tutorial, or ask for help in case you didn’t!

Perhaps you think these should be the default gibs for the game, more fitting the art style? Share your thoughts.