Operation Broken Fang ended- a few days ago now, actually. What this means for us is that
the game can finally receive new updates worth covering again! Train has been swapped out
for Ancient in the competitive map pool, there’s a new subscription-based stat-tracking service
called 360, there are new community-made maps and skins, and new chicken models.
A quick reminder- if you have any operation stars remaining, then you might as well exchange
them for stuff. These expire on the 15th of May.
I’ll start by covering Ancient, since the map has had a few layout changes.
Most notably, there’s this new route leading out of CT spawn and into A in two different
places. This gives the CTs a new route to approach the site from, new places to GUARD
the site from, and will give terrorists some powerful new after-plant positions. So a huge
change there- and the narrow skylight in the T tunnels has been opened up. It might be
narrow but it should enable plenty of pre-rush smokes and flash possibilities. But just know
that you can only use this skylight- the other has been closed up. And once they reach the
site, they can now stand on top of the ledge just here. Though I expect both teams to find
uses for this area. And a crate has been added to the far wall, which used to be a very exposed
part of the map. Moving over to middle, the terrorist entrance
has been widened to reduce bottlenecking and to open a sight line between there and this
corner opposite. And over on bombsite B, the plant area has
been extended to cover the whole of the raised, patterned area. Though oddly, the area outlined
on the map doesn’t stretch out far enough. Valve pls fi
Changes to Nuke involve a new clip brush over this window here, which I guess is to prevent
a pixel-ledge exploit. But as for the other patchnote, I have NO IDEA where this misaligned
light could have been! I went about the map, taking numerous comparison shots. And I did
this multiple times. I thought it would be easy to spot misaligned lights, but the more
I looked, the more I suspected every light of being misaligned in one way or another.
Yet nowhere I looked, did I see any changes. None. But a lot of the lights do appear to
be off, so Valve, pls fi- And there have been a few changes to Frostbite
as well. Again, I sucked at spotting most of these, but I can confirm that the interiors
are much better lit than they were before, being brighter and nicer in general. And the
water shader, when set to low or medium, represents the general colour palette of the map better
than it did previously where it went a bit too greeny in the distance.
The end of the Broken Fang Operation sees some of the features it introduced to the
game remaining in it, in some form or fashion. Retake mode remains a thing, as does the Premiere
feature for matchmaking- and I would expect to see this prioritised in the future to cut
down on matchmaking waiting times. Train, although removed from Active Duty, is still
available to play, but only in reserves. We say goodbye to the community-made maps:
Apollo, Anubis and Engage. And hello, to Grind and Mocha. Mocha is the 5th map to be featured
in the game from the top 10 of Mapcore’s 2019 Exotic Places competition. The others
were Mutiny, Swamp, Anubis and Chlorine. The other new map, ‘Grind’, is a little more
unexpected, being an older map that I guess was overlooked at the time. But its makers
are familiar names to me, RZL being known for Engage and I know Horse Strangler for…
his name. And some of the maps he’s made. Just as I was getting used to them, the wingman
maps, Elysion and Guard, have been taken out and replaced with Calavera and Pitstop. Pitstop
is rather self-explanatory, taking place in that Hitman level with the fast cars everywhere.
And Calavera is a day of the dead themed map, which was apparently planned for the operation
but then cut before release. Broken Fang is over, so we can now receive
the Snakebite case, containing 17 new community-made skins and 24 possible glove drops.
The new CS:GO 360 stats feature comes as a surprise. It’s a subscription-based service
where you can pay $1 a month and it will track and display all of your competitive and wingman
losses. And wins. Something that other sites can already do for free. This feature is still
available to people who don’t subscribe, but it will only display your existing stats.
So my horrendous 30% winrate during Broken Fang will just sit here, haunting me forever,
until I pay for the chance of making them better again. Or worse.
The idea of a monthly subscription to CS:GO is intriguing, though Valve could do a lot
more to it to make this feature more appealing than it is right now, in my opinion. Priority
matchmaking, more drops, cheaper operation passes, that kind of thing. But I’m curious-
which of you will pay for this feature in its current state?
The chickens have had a visual makeover! Their old models were a bit plasticine-y and blobby,
but the new ones are crisp and sharp. Just the way I like my chicken. It was at this
point when making the video that I went off on a day-long tangent to investigate these
things, so check out my dedicated chicken video if you’d like to know all about them.
Their polygon count is now higher than most characters were in Half Life 2. Their comb
and wattle remain wobbly, though slightly less so than before. I love their slight beak
wobble though. Very chiken. The game has received several ‘security’
and ‘stability’ improvements, and as well as these has fixed a problem with an earlier
patch that caused custom maps with custom textures to turn black. I know it happened
to a few of my maps but thanks to my laziness I didn’t get around to fixing them, and
now I don’t have to because the problem has fixed itself.
A fix for fog has been rolled out- previously, the ‘boost player contrast’ feature was
making player models visible well beyond the range of fog, meaning they appeared to be
floating in the air. It sounds really specific, but this fix will help anybody who happens
to be working on a large, foggy level, possibly with multiple insertion points.
I must say it’s a relief to see these sorts of updates again. I much prefer to have more
regular patchnotes to read and the duration of an operation is always a bit of a dry-spell
for that sort of stuff. So, onto the future!