After my first -and surprisingly adult-rated video on this topic, I proudly present another
5 things about Counter Strike 2 that I like! Or find fun in some way. And this video’s much more
child friendly. ECHOES
Everybody likes echoes. Even children! Back in the 90’s, games seemed to like them too. Sure,
that era couldn’t do graphics that well, but they DID do good audio. They had surround
effects and occlusion you could actually hear the difference it was making! It used to be
cool to have your own dedicated sound card slotted in just beneath your graphics card,
back before onboard audio supposedly got just as good but I don’t really think it
is. So playing a game from that era, listen to the echoes in Half Life 1!
You’d go into a new area, and the sounds would change. The
gun’s echoes would change. Maybe it was all a bit over the top,
but I kind of liked it. Source sadly did away with all these cool things,
but they have been adding them back slowly ever since.
Because cool-sounding sounds are coming back into fashion! Ready
or Not has just received an update for them, Rainbow Six Siege always had them,
CS:GO had a few stabs at it but now Source 2 brings the full force of 90’s audio! And with
a VENGEANCE. Listen to this same gunshot, fired in different parts of the map.
See! Half Life 1 had the right idea all along. GLOBAL ILLUMINATION
Light giveth, and light taketh away. Global Illumination is the bit that giveth,
and it’s why the levels in Counter-Strike 2 look so much brighter and more colourful than they
did in CS:GO. EVERY version of Counter-Strike has had pre-calculated global illumination,
which calculates how the light from the sun and from other sources hits
surfaces and then bounces off to illuminate other areas that are nearby, indirectly.
It’s just that Counter-Strike 2 does MORE of this than CS:GO did. Which is why,
as these games have progressed, the environments have become more brightly lit and more influenced
by the surrounding colours of their environments. If anything, the light bounces in CS2 seem over
the top- it’s like if light hits a green surface, then the whole surrounding area becomes green
as well. This happens in real life, but Source 2 seems particularly enthusiastic about the effect.
As am I.
But you know how I say light taketh away again? That’s kind of what ambient occlusion is.
Now it doesn’t need to be a separate effect- it’s essentially all those dark areas of the map
where light simply can’t reach it in the first place. You can see this behind crates that are
close to walls and places like that. Thanks to the massively improved shadowmap detail,
CS2 does a much better job of making these areas look dark and shaded than CS:GO did,
which can help make everything feel more connected to their surroundings.
But all this is still cheating, because it calculates all this stuff before the level
has even loaded. What would be much more impressive is if it could do all this in
real-time. Which brings us onto… AMBIENT OCCLUSION
And I mean the bit that’s in real time, and you’ll see this in Counter Strike 2
around moving objects like your character model! Look, as I approach this wall here,
I start to cast a dark blob near to where I’m stood. Ambient occlusion.
You can either have this effect disabled, or set to medium or high. In practice I didn’t see much
difference between the latter 2- though you can see when the effect is stacked like this,
that the shadows extend further away when on high. Disabling it completely makes a big difference,
though- suddenly, the characters no longer cast any sort of shadow when indoors like
this, and your weapon model no longer has localized shadows arounds its nether regions.
Suddenly I understand why Valve doesn’t want artists painting darker patches onto their gun
models. Because now the game’s doing it itself. So what exactly IS ambient occlusion? Well it’s
sort of like a shadow, but not a direct one. It’s more like, the sum of all the light rays
that WERE reaching a spot, but that are now being blocked by something nearby. Like I said earlier,
light doesn’t stop when it hits a surface. It bounces off, and then hits another one,
and then bounces off that and hits another one and so on, and so on and so on. So when
you see a standard-looking shadow, that’s the result of the first and most powerful
ray of light being blocked. But if you block all the later ones, because they’re all coming
from different directions, it’s just a big blobby shadow. Hence: AMBIENT OCCLUSION.
I did used to force this feature on in Nvidia’s control panel back when CS:GO first came out.
Problem was, it meant you could see the outlines of things through smoke grenades,
and so Valve disabled it completely. Shame. But yeah, it’s back in Counter Strike 2
without the same bugs and is going to rock a lot of peoples’ worlds when they can tell an
enemy is approaching by how a corridor gets just that little bit darker. Here’s a great example
of it in action. Note how the walls around these falling bodies gets darker in a way
that you can’t quite explain but that looks really really realistic. Ambient occlusion.
It finally looks like it should do! It’s simply beautiful. And you might think
this effect is overdone in Counter Strike! Because surely, random places don’t just get
darker because something’s near to them. But like a true gamer, when driving into
town the other day I whipped out my phone and took THIS picture. It’s cloudy, so all shadows
here are a ambient-occlusiony already. It’s obviously most noticeable beneath the cars,
but you can see that the effect extends out and around these things as well. I mean, it would have
been better had I taken a video of this effect, but take it from me- this dark blobby effect was
following the cars that they were representing. STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING RIGHT NOW, and hold your
hand up close to a wall. Notice how the area covered by your hand gets darker, even
though it doesn’t look like a standard kind of shadow! And that’s because it’s all the indirect
bounce-lighting that you’re blocking from reaching that surface. Ambient Occlusion. This game is
going to make us all obsessed with this effect. You can thank me later.
BODY Oh yeah
and your character has a BODY now! The year is 2023, we’ve had videogames for decades and yet
it’s still unusual to look down and to be able to see your legs and torso. Just stop and think
about that for a moment- it’s WEIRD to look down and to be able to see your body there. In games
we’re all too used to being legless floaty gun arms, which I guess has certain advantages, like
being able to see beneath you without obstructed vision, AND it avoids having to see of the shoddy
animations that might be present otherwise. Counter-Strike 2 though certainly isn’t the
first game to attempt a visible body. I won’t start listing them because it just legitimizes
all those obnoxious comments I’ll be getting, telling me which ones I’ve forgotten, so I’ll
just talk about one other game. With that game being… Left 4 Dead! Not the second one: ONLY the
first one. That’s why you don’t remember it having it. The animations are relatively serviceable too
so I’m kind of surprised they removed it for the second. That being said, the animations in Counter
Strike 2 seem to run at a smoother framerate, and rather than facing sideways at times,
are more insistent on facing where you’re looking. Your body also fades out and goes transparent if
it gets too close to your vision, presumably to aide with you being able to see your surroundings.
So I’d say it’s an improvement over the system in Left 4 Dead 2, but not by a HUGE amount.
Half Life Alyx took MAJOR STRIDES in improving walking animations for characters in that game,
having them automatically wibble their legs to shift their weight about in a convincing
manner. So I’m kind of surprised that Counter Strike 2 doesn’t seem to integrate these same
improvements. Your character insists on an awkward wide-legged pose, with one or even both
feet often left hanging over the edge of drops. There’s definitely room for improvement here.
So there: Valve has tried to add a new feature and I’ve spent all this time criticizing it. But
that’s unfair because it also has its perks. Like giving paid character models more of a purpose.
You can see your weapons’ custom skins, why not extend that to your character models as well? But
the BIG improvement is that, being able to see your legs, lets you see where you’re stood in
the level! You can see if your feet poke out from beyond a corner now. So it helps represent your
position in the game better, which could help in a game as competitive as this one is. But there’s
also another thing that previous Counter-Strike games didn’t have- and that was a representation
of where your player’s shadow was! Now you can see if that too is poking around an upcoming corner,
or potentially giving away your position in some way! Really interestingly, I can’t see many places
in Dust2 where it will. In the directions where it could have done, the edges of the walls have been
shaved off to become diagonals, meaning that you can see around the corner at about the same time
as your shadow begins to poke around it, so I can only count a handful of spots on this map where
you do need to be mindful of your shadow. It’s the same as it’s been in CS:GO for years- it’s just
that now you’ll be aware of it! NO SKYBOX
Ever since Half Life 1, the Counter-Strike series has all been set indoors, but with
sky painted onto the outside areas to give the impression that it isn’t. That’s why grenades
bounce off invisible walls wherever you go, unless the mapper has accounted for this by
making the skybox walls super far away. So this Dust2 version in Source 2 does
still appear to have invisible sky walls everywhere. But most critically:
grenades no longer care. They will pass straight through these invisible boundaries, and into the
unknown beyond! So you can now lob a grenade from anywhere in the level, to anywhere else. Provided
you can throw hard enough. It’s awesome, but is kind of how it should have been in the first
place. You can even lob it straight off the side of the map, and into the great unknown beyond.
I don’t know how it’s taken this long to feature this, but it’s here now so there.
SMOKE GRENADES How can I NOT cover the smoke
grenades. This is something that everybody else has covered already- but for good reason! Because
it takes one of the weakest and most exploitable mechanics from CS:GO, and transforms it into
one of the strongest (and most exploitable) mechanics in Counter Strike 2. A quick recap:
Smokes in CS:GO made a ball of smoke, which was the same no matter where it was and people got
angry with all the bugs and exploits associated with them. Smoke grenades were one of the weakest
aspects of the Source 1 engine. And that is saying something! So Valve was like: FINE,
we’ll make exploitable smokes into a feature! And they’ve also made it so that these smokes
APPROXIMATELY fill the space around them, so they’re less likely to pass through solid walls,
and you can even temporarily carve chunks out of them with explosive grenades, or with bullets
passing through them, which is ripe for advanced counter-counter-counter tactics and stuff like
that. Don’t like a smoke? Just blow it up! Now, when somebody exploits them in some clever way,
it’s something to be praised, instead of to be complained about. Players who pass
through them remain coated in a vape cloud for a while after they’ve exited them again,
which is also a nice little touch. From Valve’s teaser video about them you can
see that it’s done using some weird voxel-based approach which takes into account what’s around
it, and then it’s drawn as dense, fluffy smoke, which seems properly lit and coloured based on
what’s around it. It isn’t perfect- you can still make out the layers to them,
and they shimmer as you move. And I still expect one-way visibility spots to be a problem, but
maybe it’s less of a problem now that the smoke is continually changing shape and fluffing about
all over the place? Smoke grenades will probably remain a controversial aspect of Counter-Strike,
but hopefully now there will be some pros to them, instead of just a long series of cons.
User-friendlier offline game setup. That’s a bit of a mouthful. And for those
of you counting, I have already covered 6 things. This video’s title is a LIE! And now for my final,
7th thing that I like about Counter Strike 2. It is now a lot easier to set up an empty
server with custom settings. I am a Counter-Strike youtuber, who doesn’t really play Counter-Strike;
what I spend most of my time doing is booting up empty maps,
and typing in console commands to tailor it to whatever weird project I’m experimenting
with. Using memorized console commands, I can start an endless warmup, I can hide the hud,
the player weapon, can activate cheats, noclip, bots, mimic bots, infinite ammo and so on. But
the beauty of Counter Strike 2 is that I can do a LOT of these things from the menus, properly.
This probably won’t make as much difference to me as it will for you, because I had most
of those actions pretty well memorized already, and if anything the new console’s insistence to
auto-fill is playing havoc with my muscle memory. But it’s still great because the drop-down reminds
me of the obscure wordings to spawn some of the vaguer things, like the SG556 and hkp2000 weapons,
as well as how to spell incendiary. It's not all positive because I now
spend some of my time backspacing out what was incorrectly autofilled in. But
at least I don’t have to tab out to look up the console commands online any more.
And from within the game’s menus itself, it’s got some great new features which will REALLY
help players of the game to practice stuff! There’s this new grenade practice feature
which I know you’re just going to LOVE. It shows exactly where a grenade will land,
and how it will get there. It’s going to greatly speed up the process of coming up with new throws
and I expect to see some utterly insane ones in upcoming matches because of this feature.
And look! An option to turn on a moving crosshair, which moves with the recoil
pattern. What a GREAT way to practice your spray control. And this is a feature that’s available
even in online play! So there are some great general quality of life improvements going on
here. It’s not perfect- it would be nice for Valve to bring back all the console commands
for practice modes that they previously disabled. And other features they could
add to offline servers which would help me to produce content would be to add a ‘fly’ mode,
perhaps triggering it by double-jumping like in minecraft, a ‘buy weapons anywhere’ feature,
a bot spawning feature, visible bullet trajectory and penetration info and a bomb
radius and damage calculator. Add all this, and Counter Strike 2 will be perfect for me.
Just make it like Unreal Tournament again. Why not go all out and add MODS? I still
think Unreal Tournament was the golden standard for this kind of server setup. Valve, pls add.