Classic Offensive is neither CS:GO… nor is it 1.6. It’s a hybrid that seeks to combine the best bits
from old Counter Strike games, with the newer ideas from CS:GO. Its goal is to become an open,
easily moddable platform. Counter-Strike started off as this, but has distanced itself from being
that in recent years. And more so every year. The CSCO project is headed by Zool,
who has been working on it since 2015. I had a match on it last year. And despite
this still being Inferno, and despite still using the same weapons and equipment and the
same familiar character models, it was a different game- and the match had that air
of freshness to it that has been squeezed out as CS:GO has become ever more competitively focused.
Even back then, it seemed ‘finished’ to me. It’s hard for me to find anything about that
match I played that didn’t feel polished and ready for player consumption. But it isn’t
finished, nor is it yet officially released. Because, while the gameplay feels finished
and polished, you may be disappointed with the unfinished-looking menu screen, or put off by the
broken game browser. These are things that Zool is painfully aware of, and is in a frustrating
position where he knows how to fix them, but can’t. Let’s talk you through CS:CO’s story.
Back in 2015, Zool took a guide on modding Portal 2, and applied it to Counter-Strike, which is
something he thought nobody had tried before. Or if they had, then they hadn’t succeeded.
…And sure enough, it didn’t work. It kept crashing, and he kind of gave up.
But then he tried again, using trial and error by deleting files and folders to identify which
were the ones that were causing it to crash. He eventually got it loading, and thus, Classic
Offensive was born. This is a video of it, back in the earliest days of the project after he had got
it -not exactly WORKING- but not, NOT working. And for anybody following in his footsteps,
you’re in luck- Zool provides a tool called MIGI which does all this hard work for you. Link to
that in the description. But be warned: you’re going where Valve doesn’t expect you to tread,
and you may face the same uphill struggle that Classic Offensive has had in dealing
with mod-breaking updates and the unexpected u-turns to the core game.
During 2016 and 2017, he continued experimenting with what he had created. Zool still wasn’t sure
what he was trying to achieve; he was just messing about with stuff to see which parts of the Source
engine were fixed in place, and which parts could be bent to his will. And if so, then by how much.
When working alone, he said that progress was fast, but that the scope is limited.
And so in 2017, Classic Offensive eventually became a proper thing,
with a whole team of people working on it and stuff. Everybody brought different skills to the
table, and then they all then went off again to experiment with different aspects of the project.
Here is a list of wonderful people who have all helped contribute to the project so far.
Zool focused on particles and model ports from older games.
Xdshot focused on porting 1.6 animations to Source.
Ordanicu helped make lots of weapon models. Bez the Bot Whisperer worked on the bots.
And Klixx did the Lord’s work by… clipping Dust2’s stairs. (And by making the rest of the map, too)
For a while, Zool worked on the ‘inspect’ button, instead using it to add small animations where
your character would just interact with their gun in fun ways- like to twiddle with the buttons,
or to wipe the lens of the AWP and so on. But this idea was later scrapped, as he decided it
didn’t contribute enough to the project. It was too time consuming, and he says was a silly idea.
Right now, he’s wrestling with the decision of whether or not to have a crosshair on-screen
for the sniper rifles. This is one of those things where there are benefits
and drawbacks to whatever he decides to do, and when he’s done public polls on the issue,
the community seems equally divided. Guess he’ll just have to try stuff to find out!
In 2018, one of the experiments was a single player campaign of some sort. They made
progress with this, until it was killed off by an update to CS:GO that Valve rolled out, where
their changes to the base game in turn broke what the Classic Offensive devs had been working on.
Slothsquadron also played a part in this project, unsurprisingly to design the weapon mechanics
for Classic Offensive. He says he wanted for them to feel similar to their 1.6 iterations,
while still using some of the new weapon mechanics introduced in CS:GO. For example:
he still can’t fully replicate 1.6’s recoil or inaccuracy systems, but says that he has tweaked
CS:GO’s equivalents to feel a little bit closer to how they used to be. He worked on each weapon
individually, first by considering how they worked and felt in 1.6, and then by going from there.
Pistols are one thing that has changed a lot. The starter pistols have been made slightly
less useless against armour, but buying eco pistols will still be a better option.
And compared with CS:GO, firing off a few shots in quick succession won’t be penalised so greatly,
but if you spam the fire button too much then your accuracy will eventually go all over the place.
You may know of this famous pistol ace from 1.6- he says that, given how CS:GO’s pistols work,
it would be difficult to pull off these days. Not so much in Classic Offensive, though!
The Wallbanging mechanic in this mod has ended up being a hybrid between the two games.
You can’t shoot through whole buildings, like in 1.6, but props like crates and much
more spammable than they are in CS:GO. You won’t penetrate far with most pistols, shotguns or SMGs,
but if you buy a rifle, sniper or a deagle then they will be super effective at wallbanging.
He thinks the meta will return to kind of how 1.6 operated, where the AK, M4 and AWP take
centre-stage. Teams will have more options for ecos than simply buying deagles, though,
and he says that every weapon will have some kind of purpose- it’s just that some will be
more situational than others. And there are numerous other
changes to the base game as well. The burst fire modes seen on the Famas
and glock has been made more reliable. Snipers can quickscope more accurately.
Weapon tagging will slow hit players down more than it does in CS:GO.
The movement speed in general is higher than in CS:GO.
And HE grenades feel more powerful now. An update a while back gave him the freedom to
configure inaccuracy after landing, which helped return the weapons more to how they were in 1.6
again, where your accuracy immediately recovers the moment you land. Despite this flexibility,
Slothsquadron is still very much at the mercy of what Valve decides to do to the base game- and
these changes and updates can break what progress he’s made with the weapons in Classic Offensive.
He now hasn’t done anything to the project in years. He got all the mechanics established,
and has since moved on from the project. Until he’s needed again!
Indeed, the project has been in operation for so many years now that a lot has changed
in that time. Ideas have bubbled and faded away again, members have joined and left,
and the very concept of what Classic Offensive is has evolved along with all these changes.
Everybody started out with lots of enthusiasm, and progress was fast!
But things changed, stuff slowed down, and members lost interest,
as life generally got in the way and made the developers busy with other things.
But by 2019, Zool felt that he knew enough about modding CS:GO to start the project for real…
so he started it all again, but with stronger foundations, and with a clearer idea
of what Classic Offensive wanted to become. It settled on being ‘what people would expect
from a Counter-Strike remake’. So they planned to remake all of the guns and animations,
to get a few map remakes done as well, and then to get it all working nicely online.
He feels that a lot of what made the community so great in the older games has been lost with Global
Offensive, due to a heavy reliance on matchmaking, which makes the whole experience less personal
and much more competitively-focused. Older games had more of a community feel to them, which he
believes revolved around the matches being found from the server browser screen. This enabled
people to find the communities which best suited them, and they’d slowly grow to know everybody
there. So Classic Offensive hopes to bring this back, but with added faceit integration!
They’re focusing heavily on adding fun stuff, like the ballistic shield,
VIP mode and a rocket launcher, since Zool believes that these sorts of things will
help sustain the community around this game by giving custom servers some fun variables to mess
around with to keep things feeling fresh and unique. Just ask Warowl what he thinks of this.
‘OH WHAT THE HELL’
Zool is trying to shape Classic Offensive into something that will appeal to two different kinds
of people: the first are the players who are still on older Counter-Strike games, who have perhaps
avoided CS:GO because they’re disinterested in its competitive focus. And the other would be former
CS:GO players who have been there, climbed the ranks, done all that, and who now just
want to enjoy the community instead- maybe for a casual match, or simply to hang out with friends.
During 2017, thewhaleman designed these concept art images. Many of these paved the way for
Classic Offensive’s rendition of Train. Here is how they compare with the current design.
This here is a 2017-edition of the Dust2 used in Classic Offensive. It was later replaced with the
improved version that you can see in the mod now. But this early map helped lay the foundations,
serving as a valuable stepping stone between using Counter-Strike’s pre-existing assets,
and the mod having its own definitive edition. Puffin designed these rather flashy looking
images for Dust2. Here is how they stack up against the final thing.
Here is the concept art that thewhaleman did for Nuke. And this is how it looks, in its
current state. The exteriors are mostly done, but a mapper is needed to help finish the interiors.
Right now, the game contains 3 playable maps. One is a remake of poolday, and then there are 2
proper defuse maps, being Dust2 and Inferno. Zool showed me this spreadsheet, detailing the status
of every map they have considered creating for this mod. There are real stories behind some of
these, with the people mapping for them coming and going, picking up where others left off, getting
so far with a remake and then leaving again. And there are several, like Mirage, Nuke and
Train, which have reached further through development than it seems. Yet Zool insists they
still require more work before they’re good to go. He showed me Train and I was surprised to discover
that… it was done! Or at least, I thought it was. But he thinks it isn’t, and that it
needs another pass before it’s fit for public consumption, as well as having
a number of its placeholder assets swapped out for custom ones. He also showed me this.
‘NEEOOOWWWWWWW’
I began to get the feeling that, had anybody else been in charge of this project,
that Classic Offensive would have been released several years sooner and with a lot more content,
and no one would have been any wiser to the fact that most of it wasn’t ‘completely finished’.
Just like the maps, I also hear that there are custom weapon models deep in development,
but they’re still waiting on them to be 100% done before including them.
So when I say that Classic Offensive already features Dust2 and Inferno, you bet these maps
are done! Dust2 even does this cool thing where it opens up this part of the map at the top of
mid for deathmatch mode, to make the layout flow better. It’s a really cool idea- and a reference
back to an indoor section just here. Of course, all this is closed up again for defuse mode.
They would ideally like to get Mirage done as well before officially releasing the mod.
Mirage is currently being worked on by DMU, who shared with me some progress pics.
The goal with the remake is to be faithful to 1.6- but not entirely!
Because Classic Offensive (and CS:GO)’s character models and maximum jump heights are different
from how they were in that older game, and so the height and size of the cover around the map
also needs to be adjusted to cater for these changes in the Source engine.
Still, he chose to base this version of Mirage in a Northern Italy / Southern France style setting,
and added some memorable geometry like a clock tower and an open apartment area.
He has just finished working on CT spawn. You can still see the same shoe shop featured here
as was seen in Canals and Vineyard, adding to Counter-Strike’s lore. The map itself is
based mainly around Inferno assets, along with a few from Dust, there are also some
made by theWhaleMan for his map, Abbey, and the rest are custom assets made by DMU and Squink.
The back of B site has been a controversial area- it started off like this; as an interior.
But then he decided to open it up to make it feel like it was on the edge of the town,
but that did require quite a bit of prop spam to obstruct vision lines between key places.
He also explained the difficulties in making middle feel like an actual place.
Architecturally, it just doesn’t make sense for a place like this to exist!
Is it meant to be a wide square? Or is it just a passage between sites?
He thinks you need to take a leap of faith to make sense of some videogame architecture, but
says that the mappers of this project have worked hard to get past these limitations where possible.
The problem with mapping for a mod like this is that there’s very little reward to doing it.
Talented mappers are best off investing their time elsewhere, in maps which could later be
featured in Operations, which has the potential to be financially lucrative. And indeed, some of
the mappers who have worked on Classic Offensive have had great success on other projects since.
Unfortunately, with Counter-Strike not being the moddable thing it once was,
the main issues with Classic Offensive have come from limitations in support. Zool says that
Classic Offensive used to use the latest versions of CS:GO, but every few months, it would receive
an update that would BREAK it in some way. So the mod is now using an older version of the game,
from before all of these problem updates. He thinks that Valve have made most of these
updates in the name of ‘security’. You can no longer boot CS:GO from the exe file. Compatibility
with OBS is broken. If you play on custom servers then it breaks certain things until you restart
the game. And Zool thinks Valve have done these things to stop cheaters, but says that cheaters
quickly find a way to bypass such measures, but that it ends up being a REAL problem for people
who DON’T cheat. Ironically, the only way that Classic Offensive can work around these anti-cheat
measures is to hack the game itself. But Zool says he doesn’t want to go down that route,
which would mean disabling VAC and losing all of the legitimacy that goes along with having that.
Zool has made another mod, too- Noble Strike, which you may know as being the Halo mod for
CS:GO. He says there were a few reasons for making this. It was primarily a test to see how far they
could go with modding Counter-Strike without resorting to hacks, since Classic Offensive’s
scope was too limited, whereas Noble Strike was utterly INSANE with how much stuff it changed from
the base game. Despite releasing to considerable hype, Noble Strike died about 2 weeks later,
which Zool believes is down to the absence of a server browser, and from its broken UI.
But he says there is a solution! A solution to ALL of Classic Offensive’s problems. The weapons
could be made more like 1.6’s, the main menu could be made customisable, configurable and complete,
and the server browser could be made workable, if only they could get a license from Valve.
One that let them make these changes to the core game. They last applied for this back
in 2019 and were rejected. ZooL suspects Valve is wary of a project like Classic Offensive,
which could be seen as a competitor to the base game- even though he sees it more as a place for
all of the ideas that Valve has chosen to reject! They’re in the process of applying again,
but Zool is afraid of failure. A lot of people have worked hard on this mod, and it’s getting to
the point where being denied this would kill the project outright. And so close to the finish line.
And close to the finish line, it is. I spoke with several people involved on this project.
And you know how a project gets a feel to it? Classic Offensive’s was so quiet that I assumed
there must have been hidden, underlying drama within the group, or an argument that caused
the team to fragment at some point. But no. Anybody who worked on the project and left,
didn’t really ‘leave’ on bad terms. In fact, they’re quite fond of the project! It’s just
that it has progressed so slowly that they’ve drifted from it and moved on with their lives.
One person who worked on it described Classic Offensive as being a 20 season long TV series
where cast come and go… and described it even as a rite of passage that many mappers for Counter
Strike have passed through at some stage! Indeed, the longer I investigated Classic
Offensive, the more frustrated I got at how much stuff seemed finished, but wasn’t, and
I pretty much told Zool that if I was in charge of this project, I’d toss a few ‘almost finished’
maps into it, and would release it as-is. But Zool doesn’t work like that. This is his baby,
and he wants it to be done right. He’s all too aware of all the problems and limitations with
it that remain unfixed. All the unfinished bits, and the problems they would cause if released in
this current state. He’s released stuff before, and he knows that releasing a project before
it’s ready can kill even the best of ideas. And he insists that, while the server browser is broken,
this mod will never get off the ground. Zool feels that getting more maps finished
is a major priority. I suggested using 1.6 map ports as placeholders, but he doesn’t feel that
represents what this project is setting out to achieve. He wants proper map remakes which strike
the same blend between 1.6 and Global Offensive as the rest of this mod’s mechanics already do.
But the biggest problem standing in Classic Offensive’s way, and the thing that’s forever
looming over the entire project, is whether or not they’ll be able to get a license from Valve.
Until then, the panorama interface cannot be modified. Nor can they link up a master
server to display the server list on. He hates the idea that, after all this work,
people will just boot up the project, will see a bugged and half-finished menu screen,
and will be deterred from going any further. It would be such a waste. There was a time,
back in Counter-Strike’s beta, when players would work through and around such problems. But this is
2022, and people expect better! Competition from other games and media is far greater, and the very
slightest issues with Classic Offensive will be enough to put some players off. The way Zool sees
it, this mod has one shot at getting it right. If it’s released in anything less than a stellar
state, it will soon drop off the radar again. Many people have invested a good amount of time,
love and effort into this mod, and that would all be for nothing. He doesn’t want that.
‘Wait, come back here!!!’