It was a long list of patchnotes, but I have finally finished reading through them. OPERATION:
RIPTIDE. Let’s dive right in. We get 2 cool new intro animations, one of
which sounds VERY MUCH like it’s narrated by David Attenborough as he talks about chickens.
‘Its wild, fear-filled eyes?! IS THAT A FING HELICOPTER??????’
It’s a match made in heaven, but it can’t be him. Operation Riptide is Counter-Strike’s
11th operation, and ships along with tons of new content and changes to the gamemodes.
You don’t have to buy an Operation Pass to benefit from the changes made to the game.
But if you DO buy the Operation pass for £11, 13 Euros or $15, you’ll gain extra access
to other stuff, like 16 weeks of exclusive ‘missions’, which give you a reason to
play the game beyond simply playing it for playing’s sake. And beating these missions
will earn you stars, which can then be spent in the Operation Shop in exchange for exclusive
stickers, weapon skins, and new agents to play as.
Those of you who have played previous operations will be familiar with what these operation
missions will entail- they’re mostly ‘play X gamemode and achieve Y objective Z times’.
And the more you do, the better the grade of Operation Coin you’ll receive. I’m
a little bit sad they missed the chance for you to get a Grandpa Shark coin, so we’ll
just have to do with bronze, silver, mustard and diamond grades. What’s the point in
doing this? You might ask. What’s the point in anything? Why do you eventually get out
of bed every morning? How do you feel when you go to bed at night after wasting hours
of your life on some soulless activity?
While there isn’t a ‘point’ in getting a better grade of Operation coin, the diamond
one does look kind of pretty, and can be displayed in your inventory forever more as an exclusive
item to show off to your grand children in the year 2069 when everybody else is plugged
into the Matrix and the Team Fortress 2 community is still waiting for an update.
I remember some earlier operations being BRUTAL if you wanted the best grade of coin for them.
You’d have to beat EVERY SINGLE MISSION, and some of them were tough or really really
long and boring. But more recent operations have got better and more forgiving. This time
around, to get the required 100 stars to unlock the highest, most prestigious diamond Operation
coin, you’ll need to get 10 stars from week 1 missions, then 6 stars from the remaining
15 weeks. Making… 100! But as you can see from week 1, there are 13 stars to choose
from so there will be some leeway each week to let you bypass one or two missions that
you may not want to do. At least not in their entirety.
So you don’t have to beat every mission. And the missions this time around give you
more freedom than ever to beat them. New for this operation, some of the missions are split
up into individual, easily trackable objectives, like this one here which requires you do stuff
in Dangerzone mode. But in no particular order. 3 possible stars right here!
This one here DOES need to be beaten in order, requiring you to make a trip (or several trips)
around the map to tick off all of the objectives. And the last ‘new’ mission type lets you
beat an objective in 2 ways! Take this one, for instance- to earn the mission star, you
can either deal 300 utility damage, OR 200, in a single match. Try not to look at this
as a ‘bad player tax’- try to see it as an objective that you MIGHT be able to beat
sooner, should you get a lucky game. It’s just another way to reduce the grind if a
player exceeds how they should have performed. You’ll get the diamond coin long before
you’ve beaten every single mission, but doing more will give you more stars to spend
in the game’s store- and more XP boosts if you’re grinding towards a year’s service
medals. So it’s still worth doing extra missions for these reasons. Valve has put
a value on a star, too- A single star costs 58p. 10 is worth £3.60, and 100 stars is
£33. For real thrill-seekers, once you’ve earned
100 stars, do you disperse those across numerous smaller rewards, or do you splash them all
out on a single covert grade skin? Since only the Train skins are available, it’ll be
interesting to see how it affects the value of these, compared with the ones in the other
new cases. I’m not going to delve into details about
the new skins in this video, but just know that there’s the RIPTIDE case, and 2021
editions of the Dust2, Vertigo, Train and Mirage collections. So that’s like, almost
100 new weapon skins in an instant right there. As well as this, the operation comes with
stickers, and patches, and the most flamboyant character models the game has seen yet! There
are scuba divers with bits sticking out everywhere. Female characters with… bits sticking out
everywhere. And topless Rambo people, who look just like that old Counter-Strike skin
again but DANKER.
So that’s the operation stuff covered. But the base game has also received a number of
exciting changes. For a start: almost every gamemode in Global Offensive has been adjusted
in some way!
There is now a new feature: PRIVATE QUEUES. I couldn’t figure out how these things were
meant to work, so hosted one of my own and invited everybody on Twitter to join. Carnage.
The queue soon filled up. 8, 9, 10 players… and then it kept on going. 20! 30. Then 10
disappeared, presumably whisked off to their own lobby somewhere, leaving me still queuing
in my OWN QUEUE THAT I HAD MADE. Eventually it put me in a game with 9 other brave people,
and from that point on it was just like regular Premiere mode again. As far as I could see,
there was no way of choosing your teams or anything like that, so I guess it’s good
if a clan wants a 5v5 between its own players, or if a large community wants a game away
from everybody outside of it. But for most people, simply looking for a match, it has
limited use in its current state. As for my game, we played one round where everybody
was very good and knifed each other in middle, then I left the game and got a competitive
cooldown. So there you have it: this mode doesn’t
earn you XP or anything like that, but still comes with all of the downsides of normal
matchmaking. All this should make it -hopefully- unable to be exploited in some clever way
by bot armies or anything like that.
So let’s look at the other new features! Regular old Competitive mode now has a ‘short’
mode. Instead of a 30 round game, first to 16, SHORT makes it a 16 round, first to 9
game instead. This is great for people who… want a shorter match. Obviously. And for those
of you who don’t care, you can opt yourself into either game length for the shortest queue
length possible. Deathmatch now has 2 new modes- you could
previously only play CT’s VS T’s, where you gained points from killing people. And
you still can! But the new ‘Team VS Team’ means everybody’s scores add up together
to determine which side wins! Which I like the sound of. I’m usually more competitive
with the players on my team than I am with the enemy, but that might change, now we’re
all in it together. But the scoreboard still looks the same as it did before, so maybe
not. And the other new deathmatch mode is… deathmatch.
No teams, just every man for himself. Which is also good, cos now you won’t have to
spend half the time running about trying to avoid your team so you’ll be able to find
enemies to shoot at. But it does mean that the amount of spawn-dying will also be doubled,
which in my case leaves very little time for anything else.
The Demolition gamemode used to be 10 rounds a side, first to 11, but now it’s first
to 6 and with no half-time. So very rarely will the 10th and final tier of weapons ever
be seen! And the round length has dropped down from 1:30 to 1:15. All this definitely
makes a game of demolition less of a commitment than it used to be. And the order in which
you get the weapons has changed as well: you don’t go straight from having a rifle to
faffing about with underpowered SMGs, either- you instead get a cheaper rifle as the ‘second’
weapon, and following that, the weapons have been buffed compared with what came before
in that tier. Most notably, the pistols. This gamemode cruelly saddled you with a stock
pistol which I’m sure prevented many players from ever obtaining a sniper in this gamemode.
But at least now it’s a five-seven, which is quite a bit better against the armoured
opponents you’ll be facing. And Arms Race has had its weapon order rejigged
as well. Here it was before, and here it is now. There’s still a bit of randomness to
the weapons you’ll be using in each category, but it looks like the weapons now go more
obviously from GREAT to BAD, but then just before you get the knife you’re armed with
a shotgun which is rather devious, since it’ll force you to get up close to the enemies,
priming you for the final knife stage! And now, if you kill 3 enemies in a row, you’re
dropped a health shot to keep your spree going just a bit longer.
Which nicely gets us onto the GAMEPLAY CHANGES. For the first time in years, Valve has made
some proper adjustments to the game’s core gameplay.
While the hostage gamemode hasn’t been adjusted at all, the CT’s have been given a new toy
to play with! Provided you’re in CASUAL and not COMPETITIVE, CT’s can saunter over
to the HEAVY menu, where they’ll find a ‘RIOT SHIELD’, costing $1,100. And it
seems a little bit different to the one we’re used to seeing in Dangerzone for $500. Turns
out, Valve has changed the shield in CS:GO for this update without telling anyone- it
now has a grille across the face-hole, meaning you can no longer headshot players through
the gap. And it appears to be a bit stronger now, too- sustaining a bit more damage before
breaking. I want to spend some time to study this new shield in more depth, but just know
that it HAS changed. Although it’s bought like a primary weapon, you can also buy a
primary weapon as well. But while the riot shield is out, you won’t have a weapon apart
from the shield bash, which disarms players, and kills them in 3 hits.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the gameplay in hostage mode. A bunch of people
shooting at the shield will make light work of its defences, but against just 1 person,
it can hold up for quite a lot of time. Especially against pistol tier equipment. And don’t
forget- while you’ve got it on your back, it makes you almost invincible to back attacks!
Very handy if you’re running through a level carrying a hostage. What an exciting change
that no one seems to have covered yet.
They teased about being able to drop grenades earlier this year. Well, now they’ve gone
and done it. And it’s as insane as it sounds- I think this clip, posted on twitter, sums
it up well. The whole team drops all of their flash grenades into a pile, and then one person
throws them all, one by one. And yes, it also means you can fake flash corners with a real
flash grenade, which has already been used to great effect by some resourceful players.
There’s a moment after you die where your vision remains intact. You could use this
to track enemy movement for surviving teammates- or just to complain over voice chat about
how incredibly unfair your life is and how the game is broken.
Well, the time you have to do this in has been reduced. I assume to reduce the chances
of abusing this after-death info-giving mechanic.
Who am I to even try and analyse the weapon balance changes, when Slothsquadron has already
typed an in-depth article up about them? I’ll link to it in the description. But here’s
a summary: The DEAGLE’s damage has been reduced, because
apparently, it was too easy to get a kill against armoured players before. In CS:GO,
upper body shots deliberately inflict slightly less damage than lower body shots do- this
is by design to create an area you want to avoid so you have to decide between a skillful
insta-kill headshot, or an easier -but spammier- 2-body shot kill. Before this update, you
could get the best of both worlds by aiming for the upper body and by hoping for a lucky
headshot. Best of both worlds. BUT, now that it takes 3 upper body shots with the deagle
to kill an armoured player, you really have to think carefully about how you want to aim
now. As well as this, the effectiveness of lower body shots has dropped so now it will
require 3 shots unless you’re reasonably close to the enemy you’re shooting at. Sloth
thinks more could have been done to nerf this weapon, but the nerfs it has received to the
body shots does make a deagle headshot a more valuable target than it was before.
The M4A1-S has had its base damage upped greatly! It’s now even higher than the AK’s is!
But in practice, it still isn’t as powerful. It still takes 2 headshots to kill, for instance.
But this update does mean that 4 shots ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE BODY -or legs, or arms- will guarantee
a kill. So in other words: no longer will you inflict 98 in 4 shots or anything like
that. Unless you’re wall banging. In which case: you deserve it.
And the dualies have had their price dropped from $400 down to just $300. I thought they
were great before so now I’m elated! And of course, there are new maps, and changes
to existing ones, which I’ve already covered in depth in another video, which you can check
out here.
There were possibly some other, undocumented changes going on as well- the way the demo
replays work means that if you skip through the timeline, it can’t just ‘jump’ to
that point- it instead fast-forwards from wherever it was before, or from the very beginning
of the match. So if you wanted to watch the 29th round of a game, it needed to first,
fast-forward through all 29 rounds to get there.
An update a while ago helped address this by creating a ‘save’ file at the start
of every round passed that point, so it would still take a while to reach the 29th round
the first time you viewe a demo, but the second time it would be able to jump straight there.
HOWEVER, these ‘save points’ weren’t created if a match was viewed in ‘highlight’
mode. But now it does. It could be that this has been in-place for
a while, but has only just been discovered now.
The other POSSIBLE change is to the ragdolls. A post on reddit got popular, stating that
bodies seemed to fall more convincingly after dying. As though they kept the player’s
movement and momentum better. However, in practice I couldn’t spot this- you can see
that they also keep it up in the older version from before this update. I can’t rule out
a change to the ragdolls, but I didn’t notice one in my testing.
That’s all I could find regarding this operation’s update. These kinds of events tend to ship
with the biggest changes to the game, but when I look at all of this, they’re mostly
minor tweaks to keep things fresh, and less of a commitment for players to embark on a
match of CS:GO. But this could be exactly what the game needs right now. Just be warned,
though: this operation apparently contains ‘intense violence and blood’.