Last night, CS:GO’s twitter account updated its banner to THIS.
So what? You might be thinking. BUT DON’T SAY THAT OUT LOUD. For this is the most
exciting news Counter-Strike has had this year. Immediately,
the speculation began. Counter-Strike. What could this mean? And that full stop. Could
this indicate the beginning of the end? NEW COUNTER-STRIKE GAME CONFIRMED?!?! and so on.
The community was in full frenzy. Tensions couldn’t be greater.
And then the banner changed again.
I can’t actually remember what the banner was before all this,
so I searched back to try and find what it had changed from. One Source
2 speculation thread later I found… this. Look at that subtle off-white coloring.
The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even had a watermark!
So yeah, the biggest game on Steam can get people excited simply by posting variations
of the game’s name and logo. Which is just as well cos that’s all we seem to get these days.
But some people aren’t happy with this. So, desperate for more,
one fan adjusted the brightness and contrast of the banner to reveal… a BLOB! Evidently,
understanding this was key to figuring out when we’d be getting the next big update.
And being the trolls that they are, Valve changed the logo to actually contain some hidden text,
this text TEASING that it’s a banner and nothing more.
Source 2 confirmed.
Rather than going through this whole song and dance every time Valve changes their twitter
banner pic, let’s construct a HYPE ladder. And right at the very top of this hyper-ladder MUST
be… SOURCE 2! We don’t even know what Source 2 CS:GO means any more. What it’s even meant to
fix at this point? But remember just how excited people got about the Panorama overhaul- and that
was just a new-looking main menu and in-game HUD! A new game engine would be insane! The
internet would break. And likely, so would the game. The first 24 hours of excitement
would quickly give way to people complaining that the grenades look different, or sound the same,
or bounce the same or differently from before. The new Source 2 lighting would look better,
but subtly so and people would ask ‘is that it’ before complaining that
their framerates are lower or higher than they were before. Then people would start
posting on the forums with screenshots from 2022 CS:GO saying how much they miss it. And
I’d be in the corner getting all excited about the new upscaling possibilities.
That’s the best-case scenario right there. Isn’t that depressing. But for those of you
looking for as visual make-over, there’s an even more exciting possibility: and
that’s RTX Remix. Valve has already collaborated with Nvidia to make Portal RTX a thing, so it
would be possible -if a terrible idea for a good number of reasons- for this raytracing tech to
make its way to CS:GO. For those of you who don’t know what it is, RTX Remix is a visual overlay,
that swaps out everything from an older game for fully pathtraced, modern material-based
system. The benefit of this is that it would retain exactly how CS:GO is, right now,
since it’s merely a visual overlay, so it wouldn’t ‘break’ the game at all. The other benefit is that
this is cutting-edge tech: it’s kind of like end-game stuff cos once you’ve got pathtracing
in a game then how much better can the graphics get. The downsides, however, would be numerous,
from the immense slow-down it would cause, the incompatibilities with many existing systems, and
also the exploits it could open up via reflective surfaces and the fact that it’s a visual overlay
over what’s already there, which I suspect would open up all sorts of cheating possibilities in a
competitive game like CS:GO. So I’m only saying I’d like to see this- not that it’s a good idea
to add to CS:GO. But it would be an awesome tool to add to something like, say, Source Filmmaker.
Moving back into the realms of possibility, further down the hype-ladder would be something
like a new Operation. You know, sort of like that one we DIDN’T get last year. The missions these
operations ship with have kind of fallen out of favour since they became little more than ‘get 50
headshots with a particular weapon in deathmatch mode’. But they were often bundled with other cool
updates to the base game- in the last one we got short competitive matches, FFA and team deathmatch
modes, droppable grenades, a shield for casual modes and semi-important map and weapon balance
changes. Valve likes to save the biggest changes of the year for the release of an Operation. So
it’s still something to get very excited about. Valve doesn’t even need to add something to get
people excited. Imagine how exciting it would be if they removed Mirage! Firstly cos that map
sucks, and second cos we’d all board the hype train in anticipation of a new, super-pretty
version being re-released in 6 months’ time. It would give people a reason to tune in again,
and to get excited about mundane stuff like banner changes. Imagine how excited the community would
get if they updated the banner with hidden text underneath saying ‘it’s just a mirage’.
Even a bunch of map or weapon tweaks would be nice, wouldn’t it. Especially for me. Now this
is a difficult one- because Valve has been there, and they have done that. And they’ve
been punished for it. When they experimented with releasing new weapons like the revolver,
they were deeply criticized when the weapon proved totally unbalanced. They’ve tried forcing
updates to existing weapon categories, like that one where they made all the rifles less
accurate in an attempt to nerf spraying. This -again- proved deeply disliked,
and they quickly reverted those changes and apologized for doing stuff like this,
saying they’d re-evaluate their process for making and communicating changes in the future.
Their communication remains as cryptic as ever, but their approach to weapon balancing
has certainly become a lot more cautious- Valve tends to wait until the community has identified
a significant problem before taking action on it And with the game’s viewing figures now greater
than ever, it looks like they’ve been doing the right thing, so it’s unfair for me to criticize
them for the route they’ve gone down. But it’s left me sad, because I loved having
new and unexpected updates to cover, and all of the dank banter it generated both in-game
and on the forums when they got something horribly wrong. These days, CS:GO’s weapon balance seems
almost set in stone. But part of me still loves the idea of returning to the game’s earlier days
again where the meta could be shaken up by a weapon change and all eyes would be on it to
see where the balance would eventually settle. I loved what they did with the SG and the AUG,
where they had their prices dropped by JUST enough to tip the balance, but it still took months
before people used them as their preferred rifles. That weapon-balance shake-up put a memorable
stamp on that era of Counter-Strike, rewarded players for stepping out of their comfort zone,
and made the whole community more familiar with weapons they otherwise might never have given a
chance. I’d love to see other experiments like these carried out, to see just how much change
is needed before it has a profound change on the game’s meta. How far does the M249’s price need
to be dropped before it becomes a viable option? How much does the Negev need to be buffed before
it finds a use-case in almost every match? Would upping the damage of HE grenades to
allow for one-hit kills have a profound effect on how they’re used? And what could the decoy
be if it had its function changed to actually do something that’s actually useful? And so on.
CS:GO’s continued popularity has made it clear that this stuff isn’t needed. Hence why I put
it quite far down my hype ladder. But for me personally, it would be something exciting. Maybe,
if the game’s success ever begins to falter, I might finally get what I want.
We’re down at the very bottom of the hype ladder now, and down here is superficial updates like new
weapon cases or stickers or music kits …you know, stuff that’s STILL on the hype ladder
because it’s a good thing, but just not one that will change the FACE of Counter-Strike forever.
I think that’s the hype ladder fully covered. But why limit ourselves to
the hype ladder? Let’s look beyond that, to something that would blow all of the
things I’ve mentioned so far out of the water. What if they now update CS:GO’s twitter banner
to ‘A New Counter Strike’? The crowd goes wild! The countdown begins. The game sees
record-breaking playing and viewing figures as the world awaits the big news with bated breath.