Finally, the Nuke remake is here.
It's still too early for me to say whether it’s a success or not, but this video will
compare it with the previous version to see how different it really is.
In a lot of ways, it sticks closely to the original like the way it keeps the spawn points
far out from the centre.
But in other ways, it’s very different.
Terrorists can make their way to heaven without dropping down at all- the difficult jump has
been removed, much to the disappointment of anybody who used to be able to do it.
Toxic is- OMG WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOU?!
The corridors around B are similar to how they were in older versions of the game, the
rafters have been limited- unsuccessfully at first but they were quickly patched.
You can now jump through this window, the vent has been sewn up and, of course, the
whole map has been given a beautiful makeover.
Now onto the gameplay.
What are the contact points like?
Here are the two best spawns that you can get.
With these, you’ll reach anywhere on the map faster than your teammates.
I ran around with Welshe and Dinosaurleaf to see where the two teams would collide.
The contact points are pretty much identical across the map, but both teams reach their
destinations about a second and a half sooner on the new nuke.
This is because the spawn points have been moved marginally closer to the main part of
the map- which I like.
I’d rather have seen them even nearer, but I’ll accept anything as an improvement!
I messed this run up a bit on the old map, it’s faster for CTs to run over the tops
of the drums- it also prevents fall damage.
If I had done this one properly then the two teams would have bashed heads in the outer
doorway of the hut.
Approaching squeaky, terrorists have just enough time to open it before running into
the CTs.
Running to vents is even riskier than I had imagined- most CTs will have time to set up
an attack before terrorists can shoot the opening and jump down.
And outside, I’d say that the CTs get there even earlier on the new map.
It’s very interesting to see that Valve has tried to balance this map without changing
the timings much at all- I would have assumed they would have given the terrorists a bit
of a head-start to even things out.
But no.
And now there’s a new route: up and around the outside building.
I don’t think that we took the shortest paths, somebody’s going to come along and
do a fancy parkour manoeuvre and get there even faster, but I doubt it will be reliable
every time.
With a good run, terrorists should have enough time to jump down and maybe to even hide behind
those big vent things on the lower part of the roof.
I’ll be very interested to see how this strategy plays out, especially since terrorists
taking the ground route will have 4 seconds to set up grenades to help their team along
this upper path.
Onto framerate, which has been a controversial topic for lots of people.
Many have claimed that this new map isn’t optimised, when technically it is but there’s
just a lot more stuff on-screen, hence the lower FPS.
But I get what you mean.
I set my game to maximum settings at 4K resolution and with 4X AA (and FXAA as well because it
slyly enables whenever my back is turned).
Here were my results.
Framerate has dropped on average by about 40% and didn’t fluctuate too much when stood
still, making the maximum and minimum values roughly the same as the averages.
But wow, in return for this drop in FPS, we get some gorgeous visuals.
But that’s to be expected, since the old map was made over 10 years ago now!
The lowest framerates on this new map were found in bombsite A and the T side of outside.
There’s quite a bit of variance between the best and worst areas, in a perfect world
every place would deliver the same FPS but that’s difficult to achieve.
In my opinion, these new visuals are worth a 40% drop in framerate, especially since
the Source 2 update will come out and will fix everything and will give us all 1000 FPS
blah blah blah blah and Half Life 3.
Out of curiosity, I also compared it with Train and Dust2.
Obviously I couldn’t get the same locations, but I tried to find similar and these were
the results.
I was surprised by how similar it was to Train.
Yes, on average it’s about 20% slower, but that’s only because Train has a couple of
places that get really high FPS, particularly in the narrow corridors.
The more important stats to look at are the minimum ones and the areas of importance,
like the bombsites.
I’m happy to say that these places are surprisingly similar between the two maps- or at least,
they are on my computer.
Incredibly, Dust2 manages to look better than the old Nuke and yet still gets a higher average
framerate.
It’s definitely a map made in heaven.
So in conclusion, new Nuke is beautiful to watch yet slower to run, and different to
play in some surprising ways.