‘I think you all should know I am going to be AFK for a few days towards the end of this month’
‘Not much internet here. Sure hope I don’t miss something… miss something… miss something…’
I know that a lot of you won’t have access to Counter-Strike 2 just yet.
I only got access today, so this is one of a few quick ‘first impression’ videos
that I’ll be doing. Simply to show you what the whole thing looks like.
I don’t think I ever thought or cared about what happened to the main menu with regards
to Source 2, but it’s the first big thing that you’ll notice when you boot Counter Strike 2 up,
and is going to be a place that you’ll spend a fair chunk of time. So it’s worth covering!
Once you get access to Counter-Strike 2, then loading it up from Steam will
present this menu from which you can select the new and limited version of your favourite
game. Instead of the game loading to a black screen saying ‘CSGO’, it now shows a black
screen saying ‘VALVE’ and then displays a brief 2-second video introducing Counter Strike 2.
Yes, it looks a bit bugged right now on a 4K screen. But that’s what beta tests are for, right?
In my mind, the Panorama overhaul the game got all those years ago was when I
considered the main menu to be modernized. But even that was nearly 5 years ago now,
so perhaps it is about time it’s re-remodernised, again.
Just as a reminder, the OLD OLD OLD menu was rubbish and not worth covering.
Then, the old old menu was very ‘busy’ looking, and was all 2D boxes and sections.
Then, Panorama tidied this up, hiding more stuff away and swapping the focus for this
3D character model on a 2D background. This new Source 2 menu goes further in
this direction by hiding everything out of sight by default, and by dominating the
screen with a 3D shot from the game itself. Any button you click on swaps this out for a
full-screen display of whatever it is you’ve just clicked on, maximizing screen space,
which I like. If you want to view the news, YOUR WHOLE SCREEN GETS NEWS. And so on.
I would like for it to be made more obvious that you can scroll down some of these screens-
existing players will know that we can but there’s no visible scrolling bar down the
side because our friends list hogs the right hand side where the scroll bar normally is on stuff.
So I’d say to switch the friends list over to the left hand side of the screen, and to have
a visible and usable scroll bar on the right. You have the sub-sections listed along the top,
but on the scroll bar you could even have lines on it to indicate where different chapters start.
You MAY think the most exciting thing about Source 2 would be the maps themselves,
but since, in this limited test version the only map available is Dust2, and with that only being
a Source 2-port of a Source 1 map, right now the biggest graphical change in this
new version of Counter-Strike is likely on THIS screen, of the in-game weapons and items.
When you inspect music kits, previously they looked like some child’s MP3 player,
but now it looks more like the vinyls that they’re displayed as elsewhere. And they’re
REALLY high-res and shiny. Like, really shiny. And the gun models are a huge improvement, too:
Here’s the old deagle, and here’s the new one! The poly count is greatly increased,
the texture detail is also, and the sheen looks so much more like it should do now. Some would say
this is TOO shiny… but not me. And since you’ve already forgotten how the old one looks… here
it is again! Looks like CS 1.6 doesn’t it. Guess I’ll have to remake all my skin showcase videos!
And the other improvement is they can now be inspected from all different directions,
instead of just from a 360 degree spin around the side angles. I’d like it more if they could
be rotated infinitely far in all directions, and then if they only gradually slow down once I stop
flicking my mouse. Just cos I like that feature! And this is how the character model inspection
screen compares. You can zoom in and out a lot faster than you could before,
but you can’t spin the character around which makes me sad. Big step backwards
there. Or maybe Valve’s just standing still. Because what we had previously was much better.
For the most part, Counter-Strike 2’s menus may look different, but they behave similarly to
what we had in CS:GO. But there’s one page that’s REALLY exciting -at least for me- and that’s the
ADVANCED graphics menu! Because this is a SOURCE 2 graphics menu. A lot of it you’ve seen before,
but there are a few new features and changes. I absolutely love this preview area to show the
differences the settings will make in real-time. Every game should have something like this;
it really helps. Just remember to change ‘Zoom’ to ‘Big Pixels’ at the bottom because there’s no
point in using zoom. And this will show you how the pixels will REALLY look. Let’s begin
the pixel-peeping with anti-aliasing! RIP FXAA- that was the rubbish kind
of antialiasing that everybody hated, it blurred everything and it hasn’t even worked properly for
the last few years. We instead get a new option called CMAA2, which I don’t know much about but
it looks like it’s kind of like it’s FXAA but cleverer. So expect blurrier where it should be
blurrier, less blurry where they shouldn’t be. And for some places to look even nicer than the MSAA
options do. However, CMAA2 still fails to touch other bits quite as much, like around the edges
of the plants and sub-pixel lines. So MSAA is still the real deal for anti-aliasing. It’s really
strange that Source 2 still uses MSAA, which I hardly ever see in modern games these days.
But to summarise: MSAA is the proper, good kind of antialiasing that may slow your framerates down,
and CMAA2 is the new, fast kind of antialiasing that’s sort of like FXAA but a bit better.
BUT: check this out: Counter-Strike now has upscaling! You know DLSS and how great that is?
This is nowhere near as good. Its purpose will be mostly to improve your framerates by running the
game at a lower resolution, without YOU having to set the game to a silly-looking resolution.
FSR SHOULD still make the game look better than if you used a lower resolution instead,
but even the highest quality setting of it will still show a noticeable drop in image quality.
Stuff will just look a bit over-sharpened and blobby. But some of you may be into that sort
of thing so… give it a go. It’s just a shame that this game uses FSR 1, because the newer FSR 2 is a
really good upscaler that I’d recommend everyone to use should the game eventually feature it.
But still, it’s great to see Valve using a universal option like FSR that everybody can use,
as opposed to one that’s locked to a particular type of graphics card.
The game also features Nvidia Reflex, which should reduce the delay before your PC displays
the latest image. AMD’s equivalent technology would be AMD anti-lag, I loaded Counter Strike
2 on an AMD graphics card and am sorry to say that such a feature is currently NOT included.
How much of an issue is this? It depends on your setup. You can see here in Nvidia’s slide that
even they demonstrate the difference it has on a lower-end PC, where the graphics
card is less powerful, and where the screen is limited to 60 hz. The graph shows that faster
graphics cards and higher monitor refresh rates also helps to minimise latency. But I guess,
no matter how powerful your PC is, if this option’s there then you might as well enable it.
And I strongly suspect that turning this option on is going to become a staple of all those ‘how
to optimize Counter Strike 2’ guides that will be coming out throughout this game’s lifetime.
So moving to Source 2 obviously improves some things about the game’s graphics,
but most of the newly added graphics features seem to be catered towards budget systems
where users need just that little bit of extra help to hit a playable framerate.
As much as I want to, I’m not going to go into too in-depth about the graphics options in this video,
but I will briefly cover a few other interesting things I noticed: when set to zoom mode (Which
is the pointless one), the shadows bug out. Valve pls fix. Also, lower particle settings
makes this black smoke easier to see through, suggesting that you have an advantage. Again,
VALVE PLS FIX. ALTHOUGH: in practice, I found it doesn’t make any difference what you set
your particle setting to, since there’s nowhere on Dust2 where such a smoke stack appears for real.
So it could be that this smoke stack here on the graphics menu is only here to demonstrate what
difference it COULD make. But what a way to make people choose low settings, believing it gives
them an advantage where it probably doesn’t! If higher settings does lead to thicker plumes
of smoke, then I hope such changes are only visible above or beyond the playable space
where it won’t directly affect gameplay. Though I’m sure Valve knows this well by now already.
And the ‘shadows’ option is interesting because setting it to ‘low’ appears to disable most
shadows! Which is something that even CS:GO didn’t dare do. What I mean by ‘disable’ is
that it turns off the real-time lighting on all but a few things, falling back on static,
pre-calculated shadows instead. Sort of like earlier Counter-Strikes used to. You can see
here what CS:GO would have looked like without its realtime shadows! Yuck. So this means the lowest
shadow setting in CS2 may be even less demanding on PCs than CS:GO’s lowest shadow settings were!
…and yet CS2’s still look better. I’d argue that these static shadows often look more realistic
than even CS2’s higher shadow settings do. And yet, even with all this extra detail, the Dust2
map for CS2 is still smaller in size than it was in CS:GO! It might not be a fair comparison,
but I compared the map filesizes out of curiosity and CS:GO’s version of Dust2 is 318 MB, whereas
the Source 2 version is just 265. I can’t be sure that all this is just lighting information,
but I know already that Source 2’s maps can be much better shrunk down in size,
given their quality relative to Source 1 maps. Oh what’s that you don’t care? I’ll move on.
In fact, that’s it. I guess you didn’t want an in-depth analysis of
menu screens, and instead wanted a video that was more of a general overview of Counter Strike 2,
but since I was too busy tripping over vipers to post soon after that first announcement,
I’ve decided to actually investigate the game in more depth before giving my thoughts on it. Crazy,
I know. But right now, the feeling I’m getting from this new game is that it’s the perfect sort
of update for a playerbase that’s bored of how things are, but that doesn’t want it to change.