CS2's workshop now features this custom map, made by CZXA1, and it's called Lost Coast.
And no, it isn't anything to do with that Half-Life 2 Lost Coast expansion.
But it looks like some people are considering this to be the
most beautiful Counter-Strike 2 map made so far,
thanks to its utilisation of the graphical holy trinity,
being water, sun and highly detailed assets.
As the negative Nancy Party Pooper Farty Master that I am,
I will say that to me, it being just a flat map with a few high detailed assets dotted about
means that it isn't the most beautiful map. For I value verticality, small touches
and carefully constructed scenes, which this map doesn't really have.
Oh no! Some of the rocks aren't solid, and none of them have smooth clipping
which can make navigating them an infuriatingly bumpy-jumpy-humpy-lumpy experience.
It makes me appreciate the official maps and their looped up edges a lot more.
And there are quite obvious graphical problems with the placement of some of these props;
some invisible behind-the-scenes geometry and stuff like that-
and once you've got over the gorgeous detail that's on these rocks,
you'll see that they are still just rocks. The same few rocks, copy and pasted over and over.
But so what, for it's still a gorgeous backdrop for weapon showcases.
Expect to see this map being used countless times over the coming years for that!
And it also serves as an early tease of what maps for Counter-Strike 2 could potentially look like.
Now I thought I recognised these assets from somewhere,
and sure enough they're from Quixel, which is a massive collection of super high detail assets
that are all free to use in the Unreal Engine. But this isn't Unreal. This is Source 2.
And after so long stuck with Source 1, I still can't quite get my head around
the fact that Counter-Strike now supports high quality assets that
actually hold up to present day standards. So yeah, in short, lots of pretty rocks.
But comparison is the thief of joy, so let me ruin all this for you by
showing you how far behind the curve Counter-Strike 2's graphics still are.
Check this out. So we've seen Unreal assets used in Source 2,
and now we see something that looks like Counter-Strike being used in the Unreal 5 engine.
And as similar as it might look to the CS2 version of Inferno or Italy, this was made back in 2021:
2 years before CS2 was even announced!
So any similarities with Counter-Strike must simply be from both of these game
engines gradually converging on being able to display how Italy actually looks.
Yet even knowing this, time and time again when playing this demo,
I saw things that my brain was all like, ‘mate, this right here is from Inferno!’
And they kind of are, but the ones here are so much more detailed.
You can literally zoom into individual items of fruit,
and further still into individual bobbles and spikes on those pieces of fruit.
Counter-Strike’s, on the other hand, is more like… but at like 2 polygons, at least it'll run fast.
Meanwhile, this marketplace is almost 5 BILLION polygons. BILLION! Thanks, Nanite!
But I'm cautious about saying that even this is enough. Because I've been thinking we've had
enough polygons since way back with the Unreal 2 engine, back in 2003. This game could render
tens of thousands of polygons on-screen at once, which at the time I thought was enough
triangles to make even the most complex and mysterious shapes appear believably
smooth and round.
But of course, a showcase like this has different priorities to a game like Counter-Strike.
Here we're seeing a showcase of cutting-edge models and real-time lighting, and this single
area alone takes up 23 GB, compared with 33 GB for Counter-Strike 2 in its entirety.
This is a game that wants to remain as accessible to as many people as possible and that means
keeping system and storage requirements low, relative to the hardware at the time.
Because what we get now in CS2 would have been considered lavish excess 25 years ago,
and people back then would have been right to say that complex 3D skyboxes and fancy water
effects had no place in a competitive game like Counter-Strike. In fact,
quite a few of you probably still believe that.
But of the fancy effects that CS2 has, I feel like
their visual impact punches well above the performance penalty that they come with.
But I do think we've reached a turning point for video game graphics,
and how Counter-Strike 3 could look is anyone's guess.
Raytracing? Probably. But are polycounts going to keep increasing?
Or will our games all eventually be streamed over the internet like Google Earth is,
where no matter how close you get to stuff it can always load up more and more detail?
Or is it all just going to be replaced by neural networks that can
generate increasingly detailed surfaces as you zoom in closer and closer to your teammate's face?
We've got all that to look forward to, but for now…
…let's just enjoy these pretty rocks.