Valve has achieved something remarkable with Counter-Strike 2, and has done it almost under-the-radar. The developer has managed to transition one of the largest and most change-averse competitive playerbases around from CS:GO to CS2 without any significant pushback, large-scale complaining, or splitting that playerbase. OK sure, it did rather brutally disappear CS:GO when the time came (and the recent 'mixed' reviews are mainly complaining about that), but the fact remains CS2 is out, it's great, and the vast majority of CS:GO players have moved onto it without a peep.
CS2 is still not the finished product, of course, and never will be: support for this game can be expected to last over the next decade. And there are various small glitches that somehow made it through, prime among which is a hitbox alignment issue around crouching in particular. In CS2 this has tended to occur when a player defuses the bomb, because the CT character model crouches over the object, and something funky happens with the head hitboxes: there are plenty of clips of Ts unloading accurate shots into crouching CTs, none of which seem to land. It could also be replicated with players crouching anywhere, and some players reckoned there were even problems with strafing.
A new patch fixes "several hitbox alignment bugs", so precision AK shots on a defuser are back on the menu, though as ever with Valve there's no further detail on the specifics of the bugs. This comes alongside various minor fixes to glitches with weapon inspections and certain skins not displaying correctly, though the funniest element of this patch is a cosmetic tweak: players had been complaining about how fast the knives spin.
To explain: all players in CS2 have a knife as the default melee weapon. Knives are ultimately the most expensive cosmetic item in the game, and the various styles of knife come with certain flourishes. So the default knife is simply raised by the player character's hand, ready for use, but something like a butterfly knife or a Karambit knife has its own custom animation when readied that sees the character's hands spinning the knife around in some fashion.
These animations have an element of swagger to them, and watch enough CS:GO/CS2 clips and you'll see a vast number of players executing quick switches to their knives after kills: this has a practical aspect to it, in terms of increasing movement speed and skipping parts of the reload / recoil animation, but mostly it just looks very cool to headshot someone then start spinning a fancy knife around.
Well, CS2 got something wrong. Those knives just weren't spinning fast enough and, yes, players noticed. Such is the importance of the knife swagger that Valve has been forced to take action and now has "fixed knife spinning not feeling as fast as in CS:GO". That's a funny formulation of words, "not feeling as fast", almost like Valve doesn't want to admit anything was ever wrong: either way, players can now go twirl their expensive blades till the cows come home.
CS2's launch has seen various minor patches like this, and issues addressed, but it really has gone as smoothly as it could have, and that's no small feat. CS:GO boasted just under 30 million monthly players after all, and we'll know soon enough whether CS2 has been able to top that. The full patch notes follow:
- [ GRAPHICS ]
- Fixed a case where feet would appear black when looking down at them through a scope
- Fixed a memory leak due to particles
- [ ANIMATION ]
- Fixed several hitbox alignment bugs
- Fixed knife spinning not feeling as fast as in CS:GO
- Fixed the bolt not moving during the M4A4 and M4A1-S deployment animations
- Fixed a bug where weapon inspect could interrupt the silencer toggle animation
- [ MAPS ]
- Various bug fixes and tweaks to Mirage, Vertigo, and Nuke
- [ MISC ]
- Fixed several bugs with "Looking to Play"
- Various bug fixes and tweaks to weapon finishes and stickers
- Fixed a bug where loadout changes weren't saved if the game was closed shortly after making changes
- Fixed a bug where Steam Friends' match status was delayed or missing
- CPU performance improvements for weapon tracers
- Added an official matchmaking datacenter in Chengdu, China
