Nuke has come to Counter-Strike 2, and it’s the biggest map overhaul yet! …according to
Valve’s own overhaul system, which deems the maps we’ve had already like Dust2 and Mirage
to be minor overhauls, whereas Nuke is considered an ‘upgrade’, with new Source 2 lighting and PBR
materials and reflections. And I agree with that. The outline of everything is very similar. But
the surfaces themselves have been overhauled. Stick your face up to almost any texture on
this map and its improved materials are clear to see. The tarmac now has intricate patterns
to its cracked surface, almost everything’s shiny in some way, and Source 2 is finally capable of
displaying the colour, red. When we look back, CS:GO’s surfaces just look a browny orange in
comparison. I have another video showing before and after’s if you’d like to take your time to
study these changes without listening to my VOICE. Pay attention to the ambient sounds,
which have also changed. The rest of this video will
cover the other things that I’ve noticed. Check out the shadows behind this stuff here.
Now look at them here. Both of these examples
are from CS2. And yet there’s very clearly a difference between how these shadows are rendered,
with this second example looking worse, and more pixellated and blocky. This -believe it or not-
is Source 2’s new lighting, bringing the real-time lighting that CS:GO used to have outside, INDOORS!
As you’re running down Nuke’s corridors, look down and you can make out these shadows around
your feet, sometimes even seeing two different shadows at once. I’m a little bit sad they’re so
visibly blocky. The technology has been around to blur the look of these shadows for over a
decade now. But it does at least bring SOME of the shadows indoors up to outdoor’s real-time quality,
and could affect gameplay by having your shadows give away your position before you turn a corner.
These sorts of shadows don’t appear until you reach the HIGH shadow setting,
and they don’t line up with where the lights appear to be in the room- instead, they’re
from an extra light entity that’s represented in the map’s reflections as a white ‘ball’. It means
you get slightly unnatural results like in this room you’d expect there to be 3 different lights,
but thus, 3 different shadows, but there’s actually just one bright one in the middle,
but Valve doing it this way does mean they can easily shift the position of these lights
and thus shadows that are cast, should they interfere with the gameplay in a negative way.
There’s an especially bright light under the ground in bombsite B which will cause
your character to cast a MASSIVE shadow on the ceiling when he’s stood in the centre of the site.
So there’s one of these real-time shadow-casting things present in almost every room of Nuke,
and it DOES reveal a player’s position in some very important spots. Here he is in this example.
And here’s a player’s shadow, giving away his position here as well. Even the sunlight in
bombsite A is done using these real-time lights. Look at this! At medium or low shadow setting,
this player’s shadow doesn’t appear at all. I don’t know what Valve’s going to do about this,
it seems like a major oversight from them. They’re either going to have to make it
so that the characters’ shadows are projected at all shadow qualities, or at none at all.
Or a third option would be to have some weird cut-off where the shadow fades out early,
like it seems to be doing in this doorway for reasons I’m not sure of just yet.
But I do hope they keep these shadows in because it looks kind of sad without them.
So I guess that’s the biggest change to the gameplay. They also removed
this bench from the middle of locker room, as it did obstruct movement.
We’re quickly going to take for granted how much of an improvement the materials in Source 2 are,
so time for a quick reminder of how bad it used to look.
Look at this shiny metal fence material. Doesn’t seem too hard to do right, does it. Yet CS:GO gave
us this weirdly plasticy-looking metal instead, with fake-looking sheen lines on it. Again,
the new one looks like metal, complete with blemishes and reflections. The old one looks
like an old, grey plastic texture. This example’s even better because
CS:GO APPEARS to have all of the new fancy effects on these things already. Its pipes
are shiny, and as we move the camera about the reflections on the walls highlight the many bumps
and imperfections with the material. Even the sign has a reflective sheen to it, indicating to
us that it’s a smooth, flat surface. It doesn’t seem like anything’s missing from this example.
So you wouldn’t imagine that CS2 would help improve this much- yet it does. Now it helps
that reflections of stuff, instead of just being white streaks, now seem to represent the room that
they’re reflecting. And for those of you who worry CS2 makes everything too shiny, you can breathe a
sigh of relief knowing that the wall, being the bulk of this area, is significantly LESS
shiny-looking than it was before. So it’s not that Source 2 makes everything more shiny- it’s just
capable of being much shinier should it need to be, depending on the material something’s made out
of, and the current lighting conditions. And it’s not like it just applies this effect to an object
and is done with it- the way in which a single surface interacts with the lighting can vary,
depending on whether there are greasy finger prints or surface scratches, or even what the
underlying materials are made from. The white bits of this sign are much
shinier than the blue bits, for example. And it’s also how all this stuff interacts
with the improved shadows. These massive curved concrete structures really do it for me: to see
that long, intricate edge where light finally meets dark. And this structure seems to be made
of a standard concrete material, and doesn’t appear to have any fancy effects applied to it,
yet view it under the right conditions and suddenly it will light up like a Christmas
tree! But only the bits that aren’t in shade; it just appears to work under
any lighting condition. But it’s all this stuff combined that, without changing the map itself,
has helped transform this dated, last-gen look of CS:GO, into something that’s now truly beautiful.
But there is a serious issue that needs addressing here: because Nuke IS too clean and shiny-looking.
It does look brand new, with every floor waxed, every sign polished, and not a hint of dust even
up in the ceiling rafters. There’s no wear and tear to this map at all. This powerplant is in
PRISTINE condition. If you ask me, this is Valve getting carried away with the new PBR materials,
having been constrained by Source 1 for decades. And they’ve chosen to splurge it all out on this
one particular map, because if we look at all the others, like Dust2, Mirage, and even the
brand-new, leaked Inferno images, those all look about as dry and as dusty as a Nun’s sandcastle.
So just like the PBR surfaces themselves, I expect Source 2 to provide more extremes and
variety in the types of maps that we can expect to see. And Nuke is an example of a shiny one.
This shininess sometimes works against itself, mind. Because we can clearly see that some of
the cubemaps aren’t fully aligned, meaning that the stuff in the water’s reflections outside
doesn’t always match up to where it should be, and the same with some of the reflections of larger
rooms indoors. And especially outside when you’re peering into the windows around bombsite A. That
being said, I do appreciate how bright the sun’s sparkle can look now. It looked way too muted in
Source 1 and it makes me happy every time I see it glowing in Source 2. And I don’t mind too much
about these skewed reflections, as they’re giving a lot of image quality for very little slow-down,
which everybody should be happy about. And as you can see when I turn the corner and
look into this reflection instead, if they’re properly set up then they don’t look too bad.
The SWAT vehicle at CT spawn has received a new model and a much more colourful design,
these cooling towers have been moved further away from the map, the crashed
truck at T spawn no longer steams and it looks in pristine, shiny condition, Valve pls unfix.
It’s especially weird given that some things, like the cooling towers and vents around the map
now emit a new somewhat 3D-looking steam effect. And no matter how far I fly away from the map,
it all remains visible! In CS:GO, all of the individual objects had manually-configured
distances where they would start to fade out of existence, which made a lot of the flybys
I did in my videos look buggy and distracting. Clearly, this fade-out didn’t just annoy me,
it annoyed Valve too, so much so that they personally sent me some console commands to keep
their maps looking nice in my videos. But like you can see here, object fade-out no longer seems
to be a thing in Source 2. Instead, it uses a GPU-culling technique to hide stuff that it thinks
is out of view, making everybody’s lives easier. So yeah, there’s not too much else to say about
the new Nuke. It’s very much like the old one, but most surfaces now look much higher
in resolution, and are generally shinier. I’ll end this video with some before and
after break effects, which have also been improved. Or changed.
The glass breaking effect is NOT the same as the glass in Half Life Alyx- in CS2 it all appears
to break in one go, just like it did in CS:GO. But it now looks more DRAMATIC. Cartoonishly so!