Counter-Strike: Global Offensive fixes a bug that gave players the wrong footstep sounds

Counter-Strike Global Offensive key art.
(Image credit: Valve)

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has received an update fixing various minor bugs, as well as a fairly major one that's been around for quite a while: except no-one really noticed. A key element of the game is the sound of footsteps, which are different depending on the surface being walked on. Hold your heavy weapons close, because it turns out certain surfaces have been resonating in the wrong way.

The bug has apparently been in circulation for a while, though I can't put a precise date on it, but probably came to Valve's notice when it was the subject of a recent and much-upvoted video on the CS: GO subreddit, ironically entitled The Idiot and the Footsteps. It audibly demonstrates that the wrong variety of footstep has been showing up on certain surfaces in popular maps.

The idiot and the footsteps from r/GlobalOffensive

So finally we know: any player that killed me from heaven on Nuke is a cheating hacker. The exploit is shown above occurring at various points in Train, Inferno and Mirage as well as Nuke, contrasting the Offline sounds (as they should be) with those of online matchmaking and thirdparty servers, where the wrong kind of footstep audio plays. The patch notes say simply "fixed a bug which caused the incorrect footstep sounds to be played on some surfaces."

Apart from various community map tweaks the other significant change is to the ping system, which in limited circumstances could reveal the location of a hidden enemy. This problem hasn't exactly been fixed, but for now pings will no longer highlight enemies, meaning it won't happen.

Valve has been picking up the pace of CS: GO updates, and the competition of Valorant has seen the two games move closer with every patch. Other recent big changes include the removal of bots from competitive while, in the competitive scene, the big news is the beginning of retributions for last year's coaching scandal.

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Rich Stanton

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."