![]() If there are concerns at ground zero, from a game critic and twenty-year Counter-Strike player’s perspective, it’s that the actual, meaningful changes and advances seem – well, incredibly conservative.īut this is online multiplayer in 2023. CS:GO’s veterans are already accustomed to a free-to-play model, microtransactions and loot boxes unlike the Overwatch community. It’s early days, but the fact that player inventories – some of them preposterously valuable at this point – remain is really all Valve has to do to keep players onside. The crucial difference here between Valve and Blizzard’s approaches is that as yet, Counter-Strike 2 seems player-friendly in the way it’s going about its business. Nobody knows what to do with enormous cash cow IPs like Counter-Strike or Overwatch. Which is nice - those black pearl blades look especially drippy – but even GabeN himself would have a hard time convincing you that the way the light bounces off your P90 now is grounds for a new release called Counter-Strike 2.īut this is online multiplayer in 2023. The community’s focus has largely been on weapon skins, which are of course migrating over from CS:GO and are now resplendent in newfound detail, thanks again to Source 2. It justifies the sequel’s (quadrequel’s?) existence neatly.įrom there the trail, at this point at least, goes a bit cold. You watch one popping out and immediately understand that something more technically complex is happening here than CS:GO would have handled. Nothing about it made you say to yourself, “Yes, I can see why they’re releasing a whole new game to do this.”Ĭounter-Strike 2’s Source 2-powered smokes are that feature. To put it uncharitably, Overwatch 2’s big new features felt like reading through the patch notes of a big Overwatch 1 update. ![]() ![]() Overhaulīecause Overwatch 2’s big headline features – 5v5 matches instead of 6v6, a free-to-play model, hero reworks – all felt like they would have been possible in the existing game. It’s exactly the sort of thing Overwatch 2 was missing. Smoke and frag games of rock, paper, scissors in key map chokepoints at the start of every round. Impromptu games of smoke grenade peek-a-boo as one player fires to info-peek and another waits to headshot through the peek hole. Not only does that all look impressive playing out in real-time, it adds new tactical wrinkles to explore. Frag grenades, meanwhile, completely disperse smoke. You can shoot bullets through the smoke and temporarily punch a hole in it with the air pressure of your round. They emit volumetric smoke now, which means they fill the air more realistically, with greater density close to the ground where the nade sits, and lighter density higher up. The most significant change to Counter-Strike 2 we’ve seen so far is in how smoke grenades work. ![]() Now imagine you’re the creative director of that game: what on Earth do you change? Two decades of equity tarnished, a billion dollars in jeopardy. If this fourth major Counter-Strike release, for some reason called Counter-Strike 2, doesn’t go over with the community, there’s a real financial and cultural impact. A 2018 study by Narcus Advisors estimated that the game’s total skins economy was worth around $1.3 billion. Before anyone talked about crypto or NFTs, CS:GO was quietly getting on with it. These events usually offer new skins and items for players to collect, allowing them to customize how their heroes look in the arena.If you’ll forgive the non-sequitur, it illustrates how groundbreaking CS:GO’s skins economy was. This also doesn't take into account the various events that are sure to return with Overwatch 2, including the Lunar New Year celebration and Overwatch's annual Halloween event. When the sequel releases in October, fans will be able to experience even more of that competitive nature through the game's various player-versus-player modes. The original Overwatch was a key pillar of Blizzard's push for the competitive scene. With Overwatch 2, Blizzard hopes to not only give players more of the universe that has made the original so iconic but also to help ramp up the competitive scene surrounding the Overwatch series as a whole. While players will need to wait around 27 hours without access to the hero shooter universe, Overwatch 2 is set to offer plenty of game modes, heroes, and new maps for players to explore and master. Sojourn slides into combat in Overwatch 2.
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