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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
CS 1.6 with War3 mod was peak. Classes, Skill Trees, leveling up based on kills and rounds won.
Reviving teammates, insanely OP grenades, partial invisibility, and other ridiculous abilities.
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.
Missing all of the fun custom maps people made, like surf, gun game, glass, think there was some zombie game mode where Ts were Zombies
Those still exist. Use the community server browser instead of matchmaking.
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.
The missing vehicles thing is a major one. Remember CS_Prodigy in 1.5/CS:S? Give the CTs back the APC. IDGAF how utterly useless it is.
“Blood on cs_siege” is still out there on YouTube to document the dangers of drunk APC driving.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
At least you can surf and bhop properly in these games.
Try searching for surf_.
Eeew they got rid of surfing/made it way slower?
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.
They keep finding innovative new ways of removing skill from the game and making more shit up to RNG.
That’s why I quit playing. First shot accuracy should have never have been fucked with.