I don’t know if (a) it’s real and (b) it’ll be like the original Steam Controller, but if so, the point is that it’s the most-viable mouse alternative that you can have in a gamepad form factor.
If a game can be played with a traditional gamepad, then sure, there are a bunch of good options. But not all games are like that.
The original was useful for someone who wants to play a mouse-based game on the couch.
Is Counter Strike ever going to innovate or just keep monetizing with empty fluff?
I got bored in the 1.6 and CS Source days, are people even playing different maps or is it still the same 5 maps over and over and over?
This is like watching someone turn an especially satisfying lever toy with a great tactile CA-CHUNK when you pull it into a slot machine over the course of 25+ years without ever changing or adding substantially to the toy mechanism/lever part of the machine.
Think the biggest innovation they did for csgo was molotovs, and for cs2 was smokes being affected by bullets and explosions. Other than that, I think it’s been largely the same.
Though do keep in mind, I have about 30h across source, csgo, and 2 combined; odds are I missed stuff.
Just to clarify I am not saying I don’t understand there being a core competitive game that is meant to stay relatively unchanged like a sport… but CS2 doesn’t have destructible environments, it doesn’t have vehicles, it doesn’t have any innovation at all other than being more like a slot machine than the last Counter Strike which was basically the same as the Counter Strike before it.
A game this big I expect to have a core competitive minimal core that stays relatively unchanged, yes, but I also expect a bunch of more fun, varied and changing stuff surrounding it that keeps most players actually engaged who aren’t fully committed to an endlessly repetitive sweaty grind. No I am not talking about skins and shit, it makes me want to vomit even looking up that stuff and how many results you get for how to “invest” in CS skins (eeeeewww wtf?) I mean actual different gameplay with novel experiences to sustain and compliment the competitive unchanging core….
I see modern Counter Strike as a natural next step of de-evolution of FPS design in late stage capitalism. Halo 3 was the last time a big budget FPS game company really tried to wow players not simply addict them with casino mechanics and dark patterns. Halo 3 had splitscreen multiplayer, full co-op campaign, vehicles, custom multiplayer match settings galore, forge mode… the list goes on.
Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4 then roared onto the scene and demolished that practice by showing business suits in the industry who didn’t give a shit about videogames that you didn’t have to try that hard, you just needed addictive carrots on sticks like giving players a purposefully hamstrung weapon and making them grind to make it fun to use…
Counter Strike 2 is the natural endpoint of that process and it just makes the game come off as tired and boring to me.
counter-strike at this point is pretty much it’s very own thing, if you change the game to much it won’t be counter-strike and a lot of people don’t play counter-strike to play a multiplayer shooter, they play it because its counter-strike, this makes it a pretty much ideal candidate to “just sell mtx with” and change the map pool a bit to keep the casual crowd happy.
cs itself evolved for a long time without any input by valve at all, the same way chess or modern soccer evolved without drastic changes.
You aren’t understanding my point, I specifically said I understand there being a competitive core that remains essentially unchanged.
What I am saying that is not nearly enough, it is lazy, you don’t have to change the core game to add more aspects to it, more modes and more content that compliments the competitive core.
cs itself evolved for a long time without any input by valve at all, the same way chess or modern soccer evolved without drastic changes.
Yeah and I played a bunch of chess when I was younger and got bored because it was the only good board game anyone would play with me. I stopped playing board games period for a decade or so and it took modern board games including modern abstracts to get me into board games again. Does that mean I saw absolutely everything there was to chess and that it needs to be updated now? No, but I am very much in the majority of people in feeling that chess is kind of boring after awhile, and if it was the only option to play with chess pieces and a chess board I just wouldn’t own a chess set which is why I don’t own a chess set…
I own Agricola, Concordia, Dominion, Spirit Island, Bonfire, 51st State, Hive and other complex modern strategy board games and enjoy them 1000x more than I ever would chess unless I was matched with someone precisely at my skill level and even then it just doesn’t hold me forever, I get bored and want something new.
Also… people do use footballs for all kinds of silly stuff that isn’t literally a football game? Soccer/Football is surrounded by a vibrant culture of games, interaction and play, just because the core sport is a rigid form doesn’t mean the entirety of the fun of kicking around footballs is rigid like that. Go to any random community on earth and chances are you can find a football being kicked around in an informal way, it is the opposite of Counter Strike in my opinion in that sense.
i understand your point, i just don’t agree with it. I don’t need Counter-Strike to change the sameway i don’t need a specific boardgame to change. the fact that counter-strike is pretty much unchaged for over 20 years is what allowed it to develop the depth it has as a competitive game, that’s what makes solid tactics and individual skill important because i can’t abuse a new poorly understood mechanic, that only exists for a month. CS core is so solid that we could even play the same unchaged maps for another 20 years and would gradually play them differently year over year. i know this, because we did.
change for the sake of change is the biggest issue of live service games, if you ignore the stupid monetization schemes, sooner or later they all devolve into a barely recognizable mess.
CS core is so solid that we could even play the same unchaged maps for another 20 years and would gradually play them differently year over year. i know this, because we did.
Yeah, good for you and the narrow things you want out of FPS games! That sounds soul-crushingly boring to me given all of the fun new FPS games that have come out over that period that have been way more rewarding, dynamic and interesting to experience.
I am not saying your experience is invalid, I am saying it is boring in most people’s opinion. Competitive focused players who enjoy playing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again don’t understand they aren’t the entire playerbase or that they also aren’t enough to really sustain a game either. To be honest in my opinion this is one of the most insufferable aspects to playing a game with a competitive community in it and why sometimes I purposefully avoid games like that given how those players are usually very vocal, hate anything new and will reliably be toxic about the game growing in different directions even if it doesn’t effect the modes they play.
A good counterpoint to this is Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress 2 has competitive elements but it is also just a fun game, it has lots of fun different modes and lots of different content. It isn’t just a minimal core competitive experience with some casino crap strapped on to make it look flashier, TF2 is so much more than that and frankly CS2 isn’t.
I don’t like Live Service games either, which is why I don’t like Counter Strike because it is like a Live Service game except no new actual content is ever added, just loot boxes, casino mechanics and carrots on sticks that exist outside of the actual gameplay.
CS has a healthy playerbase, dont know if it has it because or despite it’s slow changing nature but the game is still doing well in every sense of the word. what i dont get is: why does a specific game has to change if there are shiny new ones released everyday? CS existing does not take away your ability to try the new hotness, but changing CS into something new would take the ability away to enjoy CS as it was.
No, CS needs to evolve, the core competitive mode can stay the same but the game will continue to lose players if it doesn’t add other content and if it refuses to actually grow in anyway other than its predatory monetization schemes…
I think so too, and have the same kind of complaints you do, but a lot of players don’t want the game to change.
Especially the pro players who practice grenade lineups and the firing patterns of weapons and all that, to them it’d be more work to learn something new and they hate when even minor changes are introduced.
I think making CS a platform of sorts for mods and different types of game modes like Danger Zone could be a good way of pleasing everyone but Valve seems to have given up on that too.
You said yourself you don’t play it, but a lot of people do and don’t want it to change. If you don’t like it, you can play all those other fps games that are way more fun.
What I am saying that is not nearly enough, it is lazy, you don’t have to change the core game to add more aspects to it, more modes and more content that compliments the competitive core.
I think you have no idea what you’re talking about. They’ve tried that multiple times. They made gun game when CSGO released and nobody cares about gungame. They made some other game mode as well, which I don’t even remember what it was called because nobody cared about that either. They made a 2 man competitive mode called wingman and that at least got some attention because that was competitive, but largely people stuck with the 5v5. They added danger zone, a CS take on battle royales, and nobody cares about that either. They even tried gradually bringing new maps into the competitive map pool by adding them to the casual playlist and nobody played them. Even now the last regular update (which was literally today) added the retakes gamemode back and I doubt the core audience cares.
The reason you don’t see any other kind of content in CS is because the core audience doesn’t care about any other content. For the majority of the playerbase only the gamemode that exists is competitive and everything else is irrelevant. In fact the core audience is so anal about competitive game mode they start bitching when new maps get added. You’re complaining about something that isn’t even true because Valve does try different things, but you only hear about competitive, skins, boxes and other cosmetics because that’s all the core audience cares about.
shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.
It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.
All of this casino crap is just attempting to forestall the inveitable that the community will not let anything change because the developers self-selected for a community of players that are toxic about any kind of change even if it doesn’t effect them.
Now you’ve completely pivoted away from your original point of Valve being lazy and not doing anything to whatever the fuck this is.
shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.
I gave you examples of Valve trying different things from the start of CSGO, before the e-sports and competitive scene had fully cemented themselves as the central piece. These fictional players who supposedly left were never there to begin with or they were such an insignificant amount, compared to the people who enjoyed the competitive playlist, that they died out all on their own. And there’s no self-fulfilling game design that caused this, unless you want to walk back you understanding of keeping the competitive core as is.
It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.
Yes. Chess is so dead. Smash Bros Melee, a game that is completely abandoned by the devs and hasn’t received an update in 20 years is completely dead (spoiler, the melee competitive scene is very much alive despite the game receiving no updates and Nintendo being hostile towards the scene). What is happening to CS isn’t that it’s narrowing itself into some sort of a dead end, it’s the opposite. It’s found what makes it great and that has become the framework in which the game operates. The game doesn’t have to appease the player, the player will learn how to play the game because the game is fun.
Maybe you don’t know how Steam charts work but CS active player over the course of years is only trending upwards. We’ve gone from an average of 300k players in 2015 to an average of 1mil players in 2025. Real world data literally proves you wrong.
CS 2 is a free game, it is nearly a carbon copy of one of the first major popular competitive shooters and it has an intense amount of marketing around it for esports.
I think the game would have had to actively been sabotaged to not have a playerbase at this point.
Global Offensive was a paid game, Counter Strike 2 is a free game, I would obviously expect more people to play a free game than a paid one.
Even F2P games drop off in player count as people come try it out and decide it’s not for them and never play again. CS being free does not explain the yearly upward trend in active player count.
CSGO was peak, before they added agent skins. Then competitive integrity was thrown out the window. CS2 actually downgraded a lot of the game, I'm still not sure it functions fully now.
They butchered community servers and don't seem interested in supporting that scene the same as in the past. So there's no "fun" until they give it to us. The game is just for siphoning money, more than it has been in the past. The entire industry is like that and new consumers are accustomed to it, so it's never going to change and it's probably why Valve jumped on CS again.
Ignoring all the monetisation, which is basically a pipeline into gambling addiction for kids.
Counter-Strike players largely don’t want major change. The reason people play it is because it hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years or so that it’s been a thing. I barely switch on my PC anymore these days, so my information is largely dated, but Valve does add things from time to time, besides skins: new guns and maps, minor alterations to the mechanics and ruleset, new game modes (most of which didn’t survive the transition to CS2 unfortunately), seasonal events, etc.
Bigger changes like vehicles and destruction would turn the game into something else entirely and even if they were only available in a side mode, I reckon Valve has numbers showing that not enough people would care enough to actually play it (like the Battle Royal mode, which I’m still salty they removed).
You could argue that Valve is doing the bare minimum to keep the game alive and generating revenue from the gambling mechanics and I’d probably agree, but also I don’t think the game needs to change at a faster pace.
Bigger changes like vehicles and destruction would turn the game into something else entirely and even if they were only available in a side mode, I reckon Valve has numbers showing that not enough people would care enough to actually play it (like the Battle Royal mode, which I’m still salty they removed).
This all falls prey to the self fulfilling prophecy of only listening to your toxic competitive playerbase though.
Call Of Duty has a DIZZYING number of fun modes but it still has competitive Search & Destroy lobbies too, the only conflict here is in an actively hostile competitive scene treating any change even if it doesn’t effect the competitive modes as a threat to be dogpiled on.
Ignoring all the monetisation, which is basically a pipeline into gambling addiction for kids.
Also, I refuse to ignore this in any conversation about Counter Strike, it is fucked up.
Also, I refuse to ignore this in any conversation about Counter Strike, it is fucked up.
Honestly, that’s fair. Valve gets a lot of good will for making good games, but the fact that they happily allow Counter-Strike to enable what’s essentially a casino for kids has got to be one of the most scummy things in video game monetisation.
… CS2 doesn’t have destructible environments, it doesn’t have vehicles, it doesn’t have any innovation at all other than being more like a slot machine than the last Counter Strike which was basically the same as the Counter Strike before it.
Honestly, I think that’s part of why it has lasted so long. None of what you listed are necessarily better. They’re just flashy. They would ruin the design of the game though. CS could have vehicles, and some custom maps did, but it doesn’t work to improve the game so it never became a part of the primary game.
The need to always do something flashy and new I think is a reason why so many modern FPSs suck. They don’t understand their game and ruin it with features that don’t improve it.
I say all this while my primary game for ~2 years is The Finals. It’s easily the most innovative shooter I’ve played in a decade or more. It has the best destruction I’ve seen in a game ever. However, they understood how it work with their game. They didn’t just do it to advertise it as a feature without it adding anything. It actively combines with the other parts of the game to make one cohesive thing.
Hmm… For surf, specifically, I am actually wondering if you can even set the proper cvar commands for the air control needed for it to work properly in the current iteration of CS… 🤔
It might be easier to find servers for a different game, like TF2 despite having more or less the same base.
My understanding is there’s currently a bug with surfing in CS2 where you’ll occasionally just stop when sliding on a curved surface. I don’t know if that’s been fixed, but I think surf is largely dead in CS2 because of it. You need to go to one of the older games if you want to do surf right now probably.
I would be way more disgruntled about this if Xonotic didn’t exist, that was one of the few spontaneous aspects of CS that I found fun to explore on custom servers.
I don’t think they got rid of it or made it slower. They did introduce a bug where you randomly stop when sliding IIRC. They’ve “fixed” this bug multiple times now, but it never actually fixed it. It could be actually fixed now for all I know, but I remember hearing that surf in CS2 is practically dead because it’s bugged.
Have you played any of these sexual violence games? You aren’t comparing apples to apples here, and there are plenty of books that are much more graphic than acotar or haunting Adeline.
Leaving aside how gross it is, and separate from whether corporations should be the arbiters of morality:
Incest between parent and child, even if the offspring is of legal age of consent, would imply an insurmountable power differential as well as likely grooming. Incest between siblings would depend on the age differential and authority structure of the family. It’s not a case of incest=abuse, but of how likely it could imply abuse. The challenge is nuance. The goal is harm reduction
I understand that for some incest porn is enjoyable, not because they would commit incest themselves, but because incest=forbidden=naughty=sexy. Maybe that’s you? In any case, you asked how violence is implied, and that’s my take
The PVE survival gameplay - which is most of the game - is very, very good. It never stops being tense and scary. Worms, sand storms, quick sand, etc… they created an incredibly compelling game world.
It does fall a little flat when you try to focus on missions/quests, because they are geared toward making you explore. If you get ahead of them, you will find yourself repeating things a lot. Even focusing on missions, you’ll repeat certain things a little too often. The story is surprisingly good once it gets going.
The PvP portions of the game are an out-of-control dumpster fire. At around 80h it suddenly goes from being an excellent PvE survival MMO to being “Escape Tarkov: Desert Edition”. The game seems built around this idea of faction conflict, but the PvP is a completely unstructured free-for-all. It’s awful. They’ve said they will make some of the endgame PvE instead of solely PvP, but it doesn’t sound like they plan on actually fixing the PvP at all.
Overall, I recommend it. It doesn’t succeed at everything it tries to do, but it does try. And even if the developers seem a little stubborn (especially with their lazy, half-cooked PvP approach) they are definitely listening to feedback.
I guess me and my several thousand borderlands hours are not a real fan then? The games weren’t worth $80 even when they came with goodies. They’re not worth $80 without the goodies. I’ll just wait for a sale.
The video game landscape is already filled to the brims with more games than I need to play for the rest of my life and you want me to hurry up to pay for a game as it comes out, to ditch out the full price when my computer would suffer for the lack of latest gen hardware when I could easily find a large amount of fantastic games for less than 10 bucks and comfortably max out their settings?
Like, the witcher 3 with all its DLC, a fantastic game which is 10 years old but got a free graphics upgrade and with all its DLC, worth hundreds of hours of gameplay and a memorable experience is less than 10 bucks, as we speak, both on steam and gog.
Most people already have more games than they have time to play. Patient gamer has never been more rewarding. We fall too often for the fear of missing out the experience and hype of a new launch…
I finished GTA 4 and 5 like a year ago, on my steam deck. I couldn’t care less if these games came out like 10 years ago. It gives me the flexibility to play them how I want to.
100% agree. I no joke own about 900 games I haven’t played between steam (most bought when I was young and naive, probably bought like 10 games in the last 10 years now I know better), epic free games, and playstation plus monthly “free” games (not even counting the catalogue you now get access to), yes they’re technically not entirely free but I’d be paying for plus regardless so they kinda are.
Now as a lot of these games weren’t chosen by me, by no means do I want to play them all, and some are duplicates across platforms. But if even 10% interest me, that’s still 90 games. I probably play games at a rate slower than 1 per month. That’s years of games to me. And more will be stacking up in that time. I haven’t bought a game in like 3 years and it’s entirely possible I’ll never buy a game again at this rate.
Wait, it doesn’t appear to be the same within the EU.
Both the French and German EULA seems to say that if you alter a digital product, the digital product might be rendered unusable. Although my French and German is bad, so someone please double check.
That’s so fucking weird to drop a remaster or remake like that so suddenly with no advertising or announcement. Something about this still doesn’t feel right in my gut, so I guess I’ll believe it when (if) it does drop. I don’t even know if I am going to buy it if it’s real, I have more faith in the modders behind Skyblivion than I do in Bethesda to actually do right with their IPs
What’s weird is that they’re still keeping it a secret even though it’s been rumored for months. We know it’s coming, but they’re still acting like it’s going to be a surprise.
Video game marketing changed dramatically about 2 years ago. No one likes long marketing cycles anymore. There are too many opportunities for delays or “puddlegates”.
Microsoft likes doing shadowdrops, apparently. Hi-Fi Rush being the most prominent, but they also shadowdropped the Ninja Gaiden 2 remake a few months ago.
Bethesda used to have a very short time between announcements and release. This game isn’t made by them, but they probably made the devs keep a tight lid on it.
i think its a panic project that was fired up quickly because Starfield failed so miserably.
unless this was just a side project that a few devs were working on and it was latched on to as a product that could be focused on.
i suspect that while todd was failing to put out fires, a couple devs were like “should we tell them we’ve been messing around with Oblivion assets in our new engine?”
No, they contracted this game out to another developer, and it’s in Unreal. It’s been in the works for a long time. If they’re smart, it’s a testbed for getting future games off of their usual Creation engine.
I hope they made it impossible to mod. In my new but rapidly growing religion, “modding” (desacrating) games is a mortal sin. Elder Scrolls games have damned the souls of many hairy, soft-bodied men.
It’s also ok to wish that they run at a consistently smooth framerate. It’s one thing to look like crap and it’s another to both look like crap and run like it too. I’ve been playing Palworld on medium for the past couple of weeks and it was pretty jarring going from that to seeing the Legends Z-A footage.
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