Artstyle. They butchered the artstyle from the soulful CSGO
I'm sorry but hell no.
CSGO did not have a soulful art style. It was pound for pound a generic copy/paste job of the 7th console gen's infatuation with brown/grey color palettes and "gritty" visuals that were everywhere until Fortnite dictated that the new predominant palette is oversaturated rainbow puke.
where you are playing differing factions of both CTs and Ts from various corners of the world.
Source and 1.6 did that better. The Arctic Avengers and Guerrilla Warfare (fuck it, even CZ's Midwest Militia too) have been sorely missed.
1.6 and Source had wonderful bot AI that were able to put up a challenge against you if you wanted to play offline.
Disagree. Botman made better AI bots than Valve's 1.6/CZ offerings which are brain dead even on "Expert" difficulty.
And CSS's bots straight up aimbot since that update that added Phong/HDR in 2006; the one before the Orange Box engine update.
Regular competitive still uses the garbage random rankup where you win 5 matches and you still remain at GN3, only to have 1 losing match and immediately you are demoted to GN2. How is this supposed to instill fun to a regular player?
You are only as good as you can hard-carry. If you can't carry yourself out of Gold Nova/Master Guardian/Legendary Eagle, there's a chance you're only where you are because you got lucky with your team matchups. I had a friend that whined about being stuck in Master Guardian yet was never making impact plays and heavily relied on their teammates being just as good or better than her in order to win. If you can carry a MG match, you will leave MG- simple as.
That said, ranks mean shit due to all the smurfs in silver/gold nova/MG and cheaters in LE+.
Counter-Strike was never really about being the most competitvely-skilled player. The comp scene in the days of WCG/CPL was tiny compared to the modding scene or mapping scene. Gun Game and Zombie Mod servers had tens of thousands of people playing at any time whereas ESEA had a few hundred people.
I know Valve likes to market CS as this pure-skill competitive shooter since 2013, but it was always a casual-heavy game. Valve knew this too; remember that GO was heavily promoted as being very modder friendly during it's beta and first year in 2012. It wasn't until they saw that no one was playing GO besides the TOs they bullied into supporting GO by dropping 1.6 and Source tournaments that they shifted focus and rebranded CS as what it is today (see the Arms Deal update).
FACEIT. Fuck this garbage service.
Agreed.
In the same year where Overwatch 2 became known for fumbling the ball for removing OW1 and replacing it with what it essentially a glorified beta-test, CS2 managed to get away from the same fate
To be fair and somewhat of a Devil's advocate, Valve did say they didn't want to port CS:GO to Source 2 because they knew that replicating GO's movement/shooting 100% accurately was virtually impossible (and Valve is not alone in this. It's extremely difficult, if at all possible, to get the same feel in two different game entries. Ask anyone who's played a remake in the last 20 years if it feels and plays like the original). But r/globaloffensive kept bitching for years that they wanted their new shiny game engine port because "Only DOTA gets all the love and support".
Meanwhile L4D2 chads continue to win. Never port L4D2, Gabe.
CS:S Asia shows nothing on the serverlists so pretty fucked.
I thought Asia only played CS Online 1 & 2 which is a stupidly weebified bastardization of CS 1.6 and Source.
Not counting the comp scene, of course.
Cache was only purchased by Valve in the past few months, expecting them to fully recreate it in Source 2 in that time is retarded. Cobble will probably come after Cache.
It's a fucking map.
This new standard of making multiplayer maps take years is absurd.
Goldeneye devs would still be working on multiplayer if they had the same work ethic, MacMan would still be beta testing de_dust2 after a 4 year hiatus following the release of de_cbble and a tease of de_chateau, and Valve would've released CSS with only 3 maps and only finished the official map list before Covid hit.
I hate this obsession with every map having to be "comp-perfect" and balanced so NiKo or Elige don't bitch about it on social media.
Give me de_airstrip, cs_siege, de_torn, de_sienna, cs_backalley, de_vegas, as_tundra, and all the other unbalanced yet fun maps (rip de_dust & de_aztec- fuck you, Valve) where people can have fun and not worry about a meaningless rank.
How I yearn for the days when 40-90 jobless manchildren didn't dictate the direction of my favorite shooter.
CS is kept afloat almost entirely by the skins market anyway, if we ever get a proper crackdown on lootboxes and gamba, the game is toast.
CS was very popular in the 00s despite skins being actual custom models/textures/sounds/animations being made by dedicated fans for free and not monetized retextures.
It didn't need GO's Arms Deal update to be successful. It didn't need ESL/Blast/PGL's hand up it's ass to be popular.
I'd wager that after Valve drops CS support should it ever stop being profitable, is the day CS is reborn and given the chance to return to what it was that made it so awesome to a generation of Gen-Xers and Millennials.
Edit: Despite everything negative I typed, I still liked GO and I still like CS2 simply because there is nothing better out there that scratches the itch. I'd sooner throw my hand into a meat grinder than play Valorant.
