Dangerzone maps push the Source engine to the limit. They’re bigger,
and full of more stuff than normal maps are, and this leads to all sorts of cool stories
during one of these maps’ developments, and leaves plenty of room for easter-eggs,
which I’ll be going through in this video. Vineyard was made by 8 people, 7 of whom had
previously worked on the map, Frostbite, which was featured in the game a few years ago. So
this wasn’t the first time they had worked on a map for dangerzone! It’s hard to say how long the
map took to make, since they’re still tweaking and improving it now. But they started working on it
in November 2020, a month after Valve contacted them about their previous map, Frostbite.
But they wanted this one to be better. One of the mappers, T-R3X3R,
explains that Frostbite had many similar-looking places, copy-pasta’d buildings and little to
distinguish one region of the map from another. And this was something they sought to improve
upon for Vineyard. This time around they have 3 distinct themes for the underground areas alone!
He also felt that the mountain in the middle of the map, Frostbite, was so steep and inaccessible
that it ‘cut the map in half’. It was there for a reason: It helps to have a high area in
the middle of a dangerzone map for optimisation reasons; by obstructing the view across the map,
it helps to hide stuff so that your PC doesn’t need to render quite so much. So for Vineyard,
they chose to have a castle in the middle. It still obstructs your view to the other side, but
lends itself better to gameplay than a cliff does. The last thing they intended to improve for this
map was its accessibility for players without the exojump suit. And they managed to dot about
a lot of clever, sneaky routes over walls and rooftops for people to make good use of.
Interestingly, T-R3X3R went on to say that Valve did a great job with the movement in the map,
Blacksite, but then with their Sirocco they added advanced movement items and so neglected
the base navigation for those without the items. With all this in place, the plan for Vineyard
was in motion, and keen-eared frostbite players may have found this morse code,
which says ‘See you in Italy’. ‘BEEP BEEP BEEPEPEBEBEBP’
There was also THIS reference in the previous dangerzone map, County,
thanking them for help, and wishing this map luck. THIS poster could be found on Ravine.
And on the wingman map, Pitstop, hidden in full view, are these two magazines. One of
them is talking about a Frostbite perfume (And asking if Source 2 can solve all our problems).
And the magazine on the other side of the wall from this contains a 2-page spread on …Vineyard.
Indeed, there have been a lot of references to this map elsewhere in CS:GO!
THIS, is one of the first version of the map, designed in Paint.
Yes, paint. Some people have said it looks like a frog, but you’ve got to decide that for yourself.
They also made it into a massive texture and used it as the base of the map itself. Here it is,
giving the map a beautiful pastel-appearance! This is during very early development; you can
make out the dev textures everywhere, which are used early on to speed up development. The proper
textures come later. If you really like the look of these simple, white textures, then I agree:
the white colour beautifully absorbs the colours around it, and reflects a lot back,
which makes everything look bright and dreamy. And this is gradually lost as you swap it out
for darker colours instead. But it seems like in Vineyard’s case, they kept light
and bright colours on most of the walls as the map transitioned into ‘proper’ texture stage.
And they snuck a load of easter-eggs in, too. This platform here will look familiar to fans of
Assassins Creed- serving as a leap of faith into a stack of hay beneath. And it’s functional, too.
They’ve added the eagle noise, and landing in it (or around the sides) won’t inflict any damage.
AI ART.TOKYO uses the power of AI to convert your family photos into works of art!
…and the team that made Vineyard ran their faces through this site to make THIS room
of the map, full of portraits, in another fun easter-egg. All their faces are in this map.
And all of their names are featured as well, as sneaky references in the street names.
Some of them literally just show the names. But others are a bit more sneaky.
Squid got a street named after the ‘Calamari’ dish.
Quoting got this one, which if translated from Italian means… ‘quoting’.
Slime’s reference is ‘Melma’, meaning ‘slime’ in Italian!
Hassle street, referring to hasselhoff
Sethtooquick got ‘Too quick lane.’ And Josh got this restaurant.
Andi, one of the modellers for the map, gets free admission to the museum.
And this was added before he even joined the team! And this is haaselh0ff’s dog, Diddle.
This is a reference to Dieter, who worked on Frostbite, and also allowed them to use
some the assets from Calavera in this map. Plus he loves brandy.
This is ‘Deez Nuts Square’.
And this shoe brand here, is the same as the shoe shop found on Canals.
This part of the map was inspired by a real-world place called Pitigliano,
so it got these references. This building here was inspired by
this real life location… The castle by this place here…
…and so were several other parts of the map, which I’ll show here.
You may also recognise this one, from the BEST Hitman level, ever! And it’s also a real place.
There’s a chicken mural here because this is Counter-Strike.
And the computer easter-egg from Inferno is also featured on the map. There’s a small
chance it will turn on every round, but you’re much less likely to see it here,
due to dangerzone being one big round instead of up to 30 normal ones.
The picture that’s eventually displayed is of the ‘Acorn Strut’ Steam Autumn Sale 2021 sticker. It’s
a running joke between the makers of this map, who send it to each other in steam messages.
It can also be found on the map, Crete, just behind this door at CT spawn!
And the music played on the radio in the
pizza shop happens to be the pizza theme from the Spiderman 2 game.
And there’s this little AYO pizza meme, situated above the fridge.
So thank you to the team behind Vineyard for spilling the crushing the berries for me. It’s
lovely to see so much love and effort put into a map, and I wish them all the best for the future.
See this video about Basalt here, where I ruin all of the secrets on that map too!
And here’s a video where I visit Basalt for real.