Journal #7937

Nice article sir!

I agree about the lighting it is friggin' gorgeous, making every map feel-like new, plus, i love the new materials, so smexy!

Installing it now, kept forgetting to go buy a Steam card after work lol. It's going to be fun to have a fresh CS experience for a while. I'm pretty excited.

The amount of work they've put into the maps is ridiculously inconsistent.
Italy has received so much love and has been far better balanced, yet Nuke - one of the most imba CS maps - has barely been touched except to stupify the underground area.

Still, the game is a huge improvement overall.

This is fun! Is it just me or does the glock suck slightly less? I've only played one of the maps so far by my initial impression was that this is better than source.

I wish Office was just a bit brighter like the old one though.

Indeed. Been working on porting my map over to GO and the lighting is sexy indeed. Going to be fun working on lighting for real once we're done with modelling.

http://upload.habboi.co.uk/sexy.png

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but I was searching for cs_assault and couldn't find it. For some reason I really enjoyed that map, even though Terrorists were in a terrible advantage.
But this is just the beta, so I'm hoping they'll release more vintage maps.

I love assualt. It was so much fun, it showed that maps can be advantageous for one team and still be fair because teams switch sides at halftime during competition. Whichever team performs better when the odds are stacked against them would usually come out on top. I find it much more fun than a map that doesn't give either T or CT an advantage, it's all about doing better than them when it's their turn to have that disadvantage. It's just my tastes but I find it very fun.

assault was my fav map in 1.6, but I never cared for playing it in source... would love to see what they could do to improve assault for csgo tho, fo sho =)

I think Assault has always been my favourite map. So much fun. I also particularly like Militia and Office. Most others, I'm not so fond of.

Militia is great too. Any asymmetrical assault-a-fort type map makes for great CS in my opinion.

Maybe the beta map list isn't the full list? I doubt it but it's possible? Maybe? There's so many good maps missing.

CSS didn't get assault until like 3 years after it was released.

True. And it didn't get Militia until even later. I guess we'll get them in a few years at the most? I hope it's not that long. Hopefully they'll being releasing new maps one at a time relatively soon.

If I could pick any one word to describe CS:GO map list it would be either "Standard" or "Safe". I'm torn between the two.

"Predictable" would fit, and even "Boring" although I'd feel bad using that word to describe anything the Turtle Rock guys did. Maybe I'm biased.

Italy is the only super highlight for me maps-wise. It's such a good upgrade. The word you were looking for to describe the others would be "pedestrian".

Still haven't played Italy. I played maybe five more rounds but was at the mercy of the server's map rotation.

I guess the map list makes sense if they were catering to the competitive scene, but that seems risky because it's unlikely the competitive scene would take a liking to a new CS, especially considering how they reacted to CS:S.

There are files that reference a number of classic 1.6 maps that never made it to CS:S, and some CS:S favourites like assault. The current theory seems to be that they're planned DLC.

And I agree with Archie, the maps are too inconsistent at the moment. Maps like Italy and Dust have received very nice makeovers, while some like Train and Nuke remain butt-ugly and with mangled layouts (shorttrain). The new maps are also pretty mixed. Lake and St Marc have excellent atmosphere, but Sugarcane is hideous. Bank and Safehouse would be nicer if they weren't spoiled with blurry textures, small layouts and lazy skyboxes.

Ignoring that rant though, the gameplay is very fun. The guns feel great, the new character models are excellent, and so are the new voices.

Oh man. I love seeing update shots like those on your blog. Make's me feel warm, fuzzy and nerdy as fuck.

CS:GO is ok so far. I'd prefer to play with more than 9 other people (or bots, ugh) though.