It being early days for Counter Strike 2, lots of updates are expected and I don’t see
the point in covering all the changes that most people haven’t even had the chance to
experience yet already. I remember the early days of Counter Strike Source had a distinctive look
to it because character models all looked like they were leaning forward and down the scopes
of their weapons. This was soon changed to make them appear like they were standing up-right,
but to this day I still associate leany characters with old and OG footage of that game.
I’m saying this because I’m sure today’s version of CS2 will, later on,
have tell-tale signs that it’s early stuff. Things like the wrongly-coloured smoke grenades,
and these weird halos around characters will forever be
signs of very early footage because these things have already been fixed.
Now these are just superficial things. But the latest update has changed several
things that will significantly impact players of this game from now on.
They’ve disabled some console commands which made players visible through walls.
Because of course they were going to do this. It literally gave you wallhacks,
even in competitive matches! I don’t think I need to explain why this was disabled; the question is:
why was it enabled in the first place? And the answer to that is probably something really dull
like ‘5 years ago they added the command to help debug Half Life Alyx’. The impact
it might have on future games probably wasn’t even a consideration at the time. But this is
why betas exist, and Valve caught this one early enough to prevent real damage from being done.
BUT… with it, they’ve also disabled a lot of other commands- commands like ‘bot_kick’,
‘bot_add’ and ‘getpos’! Players might not care so much about these, but I regularly
use these features when I’m making my videos. I can work around a lot of these new constraints,
it will just be added inconvenience. GETPOS, for instance, was handy to remember my position
in a level to get perfectly-aligned before-and-after screenshots. Yes,
that’s how I did it. But that command is literally GONE. Yet setpos remains? So for now,
I can still work around this feature by returning to CS:GO, getting the positions I want, and then
inputting them back into CS2 again. But why should I have to do that. It’s RIDICULOUS. So please,
Valve, add these commands back when cheats are enabled, and it would make my life much easier.
Another update that breaks my heart- and most of my binds- is ‘Multiple actions cannot be bound
to one key.’ I’ve tested this and you CAN still bind the purchase of a T and CT version of the
same weapon with a single button. For instance: you can buy an AK as terrorist and an M4 as CT
using the same button bind. But that’s about the extent of it- if you want a single button to buy
a weapon AND a grenade, then you’re out of luck, because only the first command now seems to work.
Why would they do this? I would guess it’s because Valve doesn’t want to encourage
advanced binds that may give players using them an advantage. You should be running about the
map flailing your mouse around! Not sitting in the console and preparing elaborate jump-throw
binds in advance. Check out this, as an example of some of the setups that players are using.
I suspect that some of THESE are the sorts of things that Valve is trying to prevent. They’ve
just disabled a whole lot of other ones as well. Blanket-disabling everything like this is going to
cause LOTS of collateral damage. It means you can’t have a single button to enable cheats,
to enable warmup mode, to set it to unlimited duration, to kick bots AND to turn noclip on-
which was my go-to bind when starting out on many of my videos. Now I’ll need to allocate
a series of keys that I press in order, in order to reach the same outcome. So I can still do it,
it takes more kliks. Pay to win for people with bigger keyboards with
more buttons. And fewer physical disabilities. But yeah for me it’s something I want to moan
about because I use these commands in ways that don’t impact any other players, and disabling
these things will simply make my life harder. So I’m hoping this is a short-sighted kneejerk
reaction from Valve and that they’ll either revert some of these changes very soon,
or they’ll come back with a new, improved system for all! But the current system
is going to leave a lot of people unhappy. I’m not just going to read out all the patchnotes
because a lot seem fairly straight-forward. For Bez the Bot Whisperer, I’ll say that he’s
very sad that they’re bringing radio restrictions back. It meant a lot to him to be able to use all
voice commands, from all gamemodes, especially with the custom agents who have a lot of custom
voice lines. There were enough of these that he could use them instead of having to talk to his
teammates! And he feels that restricting the voice lines is another step towards the game being ONLY
for competitive play and for few other things. ‘THIS IS A GREAT TIME!’
There is a new sound when you’ve ‘successfully jump-thrown a grenade’. If you throw it at
any point as you’re climbing up in your jump, your character will go ‘uh’. And
the grenade will land in the exact same place, every time. For consistency! So if
you hear a ‘uhhh’ sound from your character, that means you’ve triggered the reliable,
consistent kind of grenade throw. Sometimes it sounds like ‘uhhhh’, other times, ‘UGHHHHH’. It
doesn’t matter- it’s all just there to inform you, and nobody else on the server can hear it. It’s
only on the jump’s descent that the distance your grenade will travel will change again.
My recent video where I stacked people on top of each other awakened something in the
counter-strike community, and you’ve all been very sad that this update has disabled these
ragdoll collisions. It is sad, but don’t worry! You can still stack people on top of each other,
just not in proper online play. So this update has only returned it to how it was in CS:GO where
fallen characters don’t stack on top of each other by default, but if you spawn ragdolls,
they still will. So fans of people stacking can continue to get their kicks elsewhere.
Why has this change been made? I would assume to improve visibility by keeping fallen bodies
at ground level, instead of potentially stacking into a sight-blocking wall of
some sort. But guess it also keeps the load lighter for players’ computers. From my testing,
the physics in this game are very well optimised and can handle stuff
hundreds of times more complex than the simple kind of body stacking you’d expect to see in
competitive play. But every little helps I guess, and you just know there will be
thousands of people on potato systems where even the slightest increase to system requirements
could spell the end of their playable experience. So that’s a few of the new updates to Counter
Strike 2. A lot of them make sense, but a few are catastrophic. Valve pls fix.