In part one I covered the first 4 CS:GO operations, which were like temporary DLC for the game.
They got increasingly elaborate, and only continued to do so in later ones which I’ll
cover now. The fifth was Operation Vanguard, released
on November 11th, 2014. Previous operations, like Breakout, would give you missions to
do. But Vanguard elaborated on these by visualising them, creating campaigns that you could battle
your way through. You’d start at a certain point, then could choose which missions you
wanted to complete. As you did these it would unlock more, until you eventually reached
the end of one of the paths which would award you a certain number of stars. For a silver
coin for Operation Vanguard, you needed ‘3 stars’, and for gold, you needed 4. The
more difficult the route, the more stars you got. 2 of these campaigns were initially available,
with 2 more being purchasable. These two, Maghreb and Eurasia Theatre, were like DLC
for DLC, each costing $2.99 extra. You could only do a limited number of missions
a week: 2 with the base pass, with 1 extra for each additional DLC you bought. In other
words, if you had all 4 campaigns, you could do 4 missions a week. These missions were
a mixture of casual and competitive matches and objectives, which gave players a reason
to try gamemodes they otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with.
Armsrace also played a part and got some updates of its own, having its weapon order shuffled
about a bit, and gaining 3 maps (Lake, St Marc and Safehouse), which were previously
only playable in demolition mode. It also majorly punished whoever was first on the
server by showing everybody where they were at all times. Valve pls fix. And of course,
this operation came with an exclusive Operation Vanguard collection of community-made skins.
There were 6 community made maps featured in the operation: Backalley, a hostage map
that was originally developed alongside Train for a beta version of Counter-Strike by Barking
Dog Studios. Workout was the only other hostage map to be included. You may know this one
as it returned to the game for a while more recently. There were also 4 defuse maps. First
was Bazaar, made by Skybex- who has done rather well out of the operations, having also had
his Chinatown, Workout and Cruise maps featured at some point or another. Façade was a map
made by Tophattwaffle, who you may know for his mapping tutorials. Marquis was a beautiful,
colour-corrected and extremely large level situated somewhere in Paris. FMPone got another
one of his maps, Season, featured in this operation- a very clean and modern looking
map that I think the community thought might officially be added to the game for a while.
As well as these 6 community-made maps, a month into this operation, the new version
of Train was added back into the game and bundled into the operations map group.
If you google Operation Vanguard, you’ll see that it’s the name of a real thing…
… though in this case, CS:GO did it first. Operation Bloodhound, the 6th operation, was
released about midway through 2015. It featured 2 campaigns, now with stories and character
voice-overs and everything. Players of Counter-Strike will be familiar with the experience system,
which now serves as a barrier of entry for new players and as a thing to level up your
annual service medals with. But this system was first introduced with Operation Bloodhound,
and at the time was simply there to unlock free drops. While past operations immediately
gave you stuff for beating missions, the ones in Bloodhound instead just gave you experience
and reaching a new level would give you a new drop! Limited to one a week.
A bit like with the previous operation, to rank up the Bloodhound coin you needed to
collect stars by reaching them on the campaigns, but more stars were required- 9 for silver,
and 14 for gold. To slow progress down, you could only do one mission a day, though these
stacked so if you didn’t play for a week you’d be able to do 7 right away. There
were 6 community-made maps, 6 exclusive weapon collections, and a falchion knife only obtainable
from the falchion weapons case. One of the mission types was to ‘assassinate’ a particular
person in casual games, which played in with Bloodhound’s story in some way. I don’t
know if anybody really cared too much about it. Operation Bloodhound also introduced the
‘coop’ gamemode, where 2 players have to defend against increasingly difficult waves
of bots. A new ‘Crashsite’ guardian map was made specifically for this gamemode. Fun
fact, the video I made about it was the first on this channel to be made in full 4K!
Map-wise, Operation Bloodhound featured Agency and Season again. Then there was the colourful
jungle defuse level, ‘Log’, a cold, worn-out map situated in an abandoned rail yard in
Detroit called ‘Rails’, and then 2 maps part-developed by Yanzl, the first being Resort,
which was set around a luxury hotel in a tropical setting, and the second being Zoo, which became
a fan favourite and returned to the game again later. There was also the map ‘Crashsite’,
for that guardian gamemode where players defended against waves of bots.
After a lengthy gap of 139 days- more than twice as long as we ever had to wait for a
new operation before that point- came Operation Wildfire, in early 2016. This 7th Operation
came with a new Blitz mode- which gave increased experience on specific competitive matches
at set times in the day. Getting everybody to play the same games at the same time I
think was used to reduce queue times- which for a while was a major complaint with the
game, though I personally never had a problem, being in Europe.
Wildfire also came with 2 campaigns. The first was aptly named ‘Wildfire’, and functioned
similarly to previous ones- it comprised of a series of missions across a number of casual
gamemodes. Clearly, the community didn’t like the earlier update that made the leader
on arms race glow through walls, so this was removed again for this operation. While this
campaign was similar to past ones, Wildfire’s second campaign, called ‘Gemini’, thought
it was time for something completely different. Most of these missions were on the Guardian
gamemode, first introduced in the previous operation. You’d play these with a friend
against bots, on cut-down versions of the 7 featured community-made maps, as well as
official Valve creations. But at points through this campaign were special, one-off missions,
all hosted on the Valve-made Phoenix Compound map. Although not the ‘guardian’ gamemode,
it retained the coop theme against bots, but as you passed through the level you were met
with various objectives and set-pieces. The health kit and wallhack grenade were added
to the game specifically for the missions on this map, though the health kit has since
been added elsewhere, like to deathmatch and dangerzone. Identically to the 6th operation,
you needed to collect 9 stars from the campaigns for a silver coin, and 14 for a gold.
Operation Wildfire came with just one hostage map called Cruise, where you had to battle
across a huge great cruise ship. There were 6 defuse maps included. Coast is based in
an almost tropical-looking Italian village by the sea. Empire is based in New York and…
has the Empire State Building in the skybox. Mikla is a very colourful defuse map situated
in a Mediterranean city. Royal is an almost black and white map situated in snowy Scotland.
FMPone got yet another one of his maps included: Santorini is based on a real place on the
coast of an island in Greece. And Tulip was made by Catfood and I think has always confused
me by having an extremely similar thumbnail to Ruby, also made by him. Oh and he did Log
as well. And Shipped. He’s made lots. This operation also came with the ‘Phoenix
Compound’ map, which to confuse things was given the file name ‘cementplant’. There
had been community-made coop missions on the workshop for years, but Phoenix Compound was
Valve’s first. This housed 3 separate missions which could be played cooperatively with a
friend. It was really cool- you were rated for how well you did in the missions, with
points awarded for doing it quickly and for collecting coins scattered across the level.
The map was later uploaded to the workshop by Valve, so can still be played to this day.
Valve has even added a little mission select bit at the beginning! Operation Wildfire’s
map group later added Nuke, when it was rereleased in March of 2016 with a sunny facelift.
Operation Wildfire came with its own weapon case featuring these skins, as well as a case-exclusive
Bowie-knife. And last is Operation Hydra, the 8th and most
recent operation the game has had. The gaps between the operations had steadily grown,
but it was almost a full year between Wildfire and Hydra- the longest yet! (Until now). It
came with 3 new gamemodes which could be played by anybody. The first was ‘Wingman’, which
has been in the game ever since. The second was ‘weapons expert’, which was a 30-round
match where you could only buy each weapon once. Both of these modes came with their
own ranking system. And the third new gamemode cycled through different twists on casual
play every week. There were all kinds of weird things- you could buy a $6,000 suit of heavy
armour in casual mode. There was a headshot only deathmatch. You’d collect dogtags from
fallen enemies, would have knife fights and rechargeable zeuses. There was a really rubbish
mode that hurt you every time you missed a shot, which kind of rewarded players who hid
from the action until the end of the round. It sucked. And then there was flying scoutsman,
which has remained in the game ever since as well. You could play on these modes even
without buying the operation pass, but getting it gave you additional unique drops from participating
in the new gamemodes, and unlocked a coop campaign full of guardian missions against
bots. To get a silver coin required 5 stars. Gold
needed 18(!) and a new diamond rank of coin required 25. To manage this you needed to
complete the coop campaign, AND to get 2000 experience from the casual gamemodes every
week for the whole 18 weeks the operation was active for. When compared with past operations,
getting the new diamond coin in Hydra was a pretty big commitment.
Operation Hydra came with its own case, featuring these weapon skins.
Of its 7 community-made maps, you’ll already be familiar with its hostage ones: Agency
and Insertion had both already been featured in the game by this point, as had its defuse
map ‘Black Gold’. Austria is a defuse map set in a mountain village and it later
returned to the game again. It also featured Shipped, set on a cargo ship. This map worked
well with the guardian gamemode! Lite was the second map officially included in an operation
to be made by Ted, following Season. I also know him for porting Mirage to Source. And
the last map, de_thrill, is also linked to Mirage, having been made by Mirage’s maker,
BubkeZ. This theme park map was originally titled Mirage 2. Operation Hydra also contained
the Flying Scoutsman map, Dizzy, and wingman map, Rialto.
In total there have been 41 community-made maps featured in the operations. 9 have been
featured twice, Seaside 3 times, and Agency has managed to be included 4 times!
FMPone has been the most successful, having had almost every one of his CS:GO maps included
at some point or another. He’s had his maps featured 7 times across 6 operations- but
on top of that he’s also had Cache officially included into the game. This means that at
least one of his maps has been playable during every operation so far. Not to mention Subzero
for a few months since the last operation ended.
Operation Hydra ended on November 13th, 2017. CS:GO has since had other major updates, like
going free-to-play and getting a new Dangerzone gamemode. Valve still adds new community-made
maps to the game from time to time, but it’s normally just one or two, and they’re quietly
bundled into an existing mapgroup, whereupon they’ll receive some changes, may jump between
mappools a bit, and then most eventually get removed again.
It has now been 732 days- and counting- since the last operation ended. Have Valve moved
on from the idea of operations? Only time will tell.