Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Review - IGN Review

A great review video by IGN, updating you on the latest CS:GO release.



- Matt

Pre-Order CS:GO Now For a 10% Discount

Counter Strike: Global offensive can now be pre-ordered through steam for only £10.76 until the 21st of august. Once this discount period has ended the price will rise back to £11.99.

Click here to Pre-Purchase
-Matt

Is the CS:GO Beta Dying?

During the past few weeks the hype around CS:GO seems to have settled. With no major beta updates and the release of the awaited Diablo 3 the beta has been less and less active. With limited maps and features the beta’s grasp on my attention is slowly loosening. In addition, the fact that any practise maybe deemed worthless as updates to the games could drastically change important aspects such as movement and recoil.

Although, the recent changes to recoil have made the game much more enjoyable, I still find myself spending several hours a week playing, trying to pull off those epic headshots. My Advice to CS:GO beta players would be sit tight and await the next patch as something tells me it’s going to be a big one.

- Matt



New CS: GO Beta Update.

Last Friday a ton of updates including new map versions, “improved” recoil and glitch fixes hit the beta. It feels like the beta is heading in right direction with each update. Below is a list of all the updates that were implemented.

Gameplay:

• Added Classic Casual to the Find a Game options.

• Increased running inaccuracy of rifles and snipers. Lowered recoil of negev, lowered standing inaccuracy for negev. improved famas secondary burst grouping, increased ak47 recoil

• Added money bonus to knife kills.

• Bot difficulty tuned.

• Removed the grace period for defusing the bomb as it allows to many hard-to-fix exploits.

• Fixed elite cycle time to be the same as CSS

UI:

• Update to the Main Menu screen:

- Rank medals earned by the player will now be displayed underneath their name.

• Play menu screen updates:

- Updates to win panel for Arms Race including: improvements to displaying the winner, animated elements, and progression icons.

• Fixed demo playback loading screen problem.

• Fixed placeholder elements on generic loading screen.

• Added timer to continue loading screen.

• Fixed assists in death messages showing up in modes other than "Classic".

• Fixed the "Next Weapon" panels not displaying properly in Arms Race before you got your first kill.

• Fixed alert text popping (position/opacity) behind the Exclamation Point graphic when the animation first comes up when the buy time has expired.

• Condensed spectator panel to minimize overlap with other hud elements.

• Removed old green tint from radar directional arrow and ring to match current HUD gray color scheme.

• Win panel can now show progress made towards stat based achievements completed that round.

• Fixed Demolition mode next weapon icons being incorrect.

• Added missing outline on incendiary grenade icon.

• When using a gamepad, the left and right shoulder button glyphs will gray out when there is no one left to spectate.

• Fix for the gun icons being too big and cutoff.

Maps:

• Added Nuke SE

• Added Inferno SE

• Dust SE

- Added overviews for radar

• Aztec SE

- Added overviews for radar

• Dust

- Adjusted size of buy zones for both CT and T's.

• Shorttrain

- Updated radar overhead map: Removed corner sections, towers, and yellow "garbage" can from bomb planting zone.

• Train

- Increased accuracy of bomb and buy zone graphical indicators on radar image.

• Inferno

- Updated size and location of buy and spawns zone graphics.

• St Marc

- Rescaled radar overhead map and angled the bomb zone graphic to match the actual angle of the zone.

- Adjusted color-correction settings.

• Safehouse

- Adjusted color correction settings.

- Adjusted radar image scale and position.

• Italy

- Adjusted buy and spawn zone graphics for CT's and T's.

- Fixed extra-large and bright light coronas in hostage area and Wine Cellar.

- Fixed a tree at Right Alley

- Made a slew of accessible areas inaccessible. Thank you, Maiho for identifying these.

- Adjusted color-correction settings.

• Aztec

- Updated buy and spawn zone graphics on radar image.

• Dust 2

- Expanded and moved both the CT a T buy and spawn zones in radar image.

• Bank

- Increased active game area border line weight from 1 to 2 pixels in radar.

- Adjusted color-correction settings.

- Fixed stretching polygons on the door frame at Gas Station.

- Fixed the door model at Market.

• Nuke

- Adjusted spawn and buy zone graphic indicators on radar image.

• Baggage

- Readjusted color-correction settings.

• Lake

- Increased active game area border line weight from 1 to 2 pixels in radar.

- Adjusted color correction settings.

• Sugarcane

- Updated color-correction settings.

• Office

- Adjusted buy and spawn zone graphics for CT's and T's.

- Adjusted color correction settings.

- Fixed a bug where the slideshow projection would sometimes show up on the wall behind the projector wall.

Audio:

• Dsp removed from all third person footsteps and gunshots to increase directionality. In turn removed audio quality option which was mainly responsible for determining dsp level.

• Moved the distance at which weapon shots cross fade to their "distant" version further away from the player to aid in identification of weapons being used during the round.

• Third person weapon shot volume raised to aid in the identification of weapons being used during the round.

Bug Fixes:

• Fix for getting the golden knife too early in Arms Race.

• Fix for incorrectly retaining the gold knife on respawn after a suicide, team change, or killed by enemy knife.

• Regenerate the recoil tables at game mode/type start; this allows the tables to incorporate parameters from loaded convars.

• We now remove the golden knife from the player if they had it and lost a level in Arms Race.

• Fixed a bug with the HUD where the round timer stops with 0:01 left if the round ends by timeout.

• Fix for knife spawning in on the ground with you if you end the round without your secondary weapon (pistol).

• Fix for single hostage shooting penalty getting counted multiple times.

• Spectators are no longer allowed to vote.

• Fixed view model hitching after a full network update.

• Fixed a crash pertaining to death notifications.

• Fixed an assert that would happen every time a player opened a prop_dynamic door.

• Fixed potential crash in FAMAS and Glock when firing remaining burst shots when the PlayerOwner owner no longer exists.

• Fixed flash bangs showing through doors.

• Fix for losing mouse focus when directly connecting to a server.

• Fix for crash when running a dedicated server under specific linux versions/distrubutions.

• Fix for instances of "Round draw" voice over playing between matches.

• Fixed some ducking pops that would happen when toggling duck during ducking / unducking.

Miscellaneous:

• First round of mostly PC specific CSM optimizations that improve perf. on all CSM quality levels:

- Optimized the core CSM shader to use fewer ALU instructions (VERY_LOW/LOW=21% faster, MEDIUM quality level=10% faster, HIGH=8% faster).

- Coaxed the HLSL compiler to [flatten] several important conditionals it was sometimes issuing dynamic jumps for.

- The VERY_LOW and LOW quality levels use a single 3D radial lerp vs. the previous 2D+3D lerp

- VERY_LOW/LOW only use 2 world cascades vs. the previous 3. At VERY_LOW/LOW quality levels only vertexlit and phong where actually using the closest cascade (for better character self shadowing), so world shadow quality is mostly unaffected by this change.

- Also adding a bunch of CSM culling statistics (displayed at the bottom of the screen when cl_csm_debug_2d is 1).

- dust2 timedemo avg. FPS results on a NV 6800/Core2 2.4 GHz at VERY_LOW improved by 13% (higher quality settings also see an improvement).

Source - http://news.esea.net/csgo/index.php?s=news&d=comments&id=11119

Efficient Weapon Swaping - ch4os1337

This great video by Ch4os1337 demonstrates the new changing and picking up weapon system in CS: GO. Some of these changes will have a practical impact on certain situations in games, saving time when swapping pistol or picking up a weapon from a safe distance when it would have originally been out of reach.



-Matt

New Recoil Update - Precision

The 21st of April maybe the day we all remember about the recoil debates in CS: GO. An update on Friday to the recoil made many people happy and some not so much. The recoil was tightened an extreme amount making the M4 and AK much more controlled, not only when spraying but also picking.

This is a great video posted by Cadred which gives a great demonstration of the new recoil patterns and improved precision.

This shift from unpredictable spread to pin point accuracy has certainly revived my attention for the beta. It now feels like each click is important; the chances of gaining that long distance headshot are now back in my hands. This upgrade in recoil has not been received in positive light by all as some gamers judged the changes as too easy, minimising the amount of skill required. In my opinion this new, more precise recoil allows players to really show off their skill and not get held back by unreliable accuracy.

-Matt

CS: GO Tip #1

Something that isn't completely obvious at first is the importance of sound within Counter Strike. If you can learn to use sound effectively it will come as a massive advantage. Put on a headset (make sure you have the left and right on the correct ears) and turn the volume up. You will begin to get a sense of where players are located around you, for example if you are near a running player you will be able to hear his footsteps, this information will allow you to prepare for his presence.

The aspect of sound works both ways, you need to carful and aware about what sounds you as a player are sending out. When you run normally people can hear you, so aim to use the SHIFT key (walk) when you may be close to an enemy to ensure they do no hear you approaching. In addition, guns shots will also give away your position so aim to eliminate the enemy as quickly as possible and then move. Moving after shooting will lead your opponents in to mistaking your position.

However, don’t trust the sound of bullets too much as an enemy could be tricking you with the new decoy grenade. This new grenade blasts out fake firing noises and could be the red herring which causes your death.

TLDR: Use sound to your advantage, act like a ninja (walk), and be aware of decoy grenades.

-Matt

Flash / Smoke Exploit discovered

A flash and smoke grenade exploit has been discovered on the CS: GO beta by a chap called “Deman”. He highlighted the exploit on the Steam forums and provided instructions on how to do it.

In console:

Type sv_cheats 1

Exec the configs or enter them manually.

Type sv_cheats 0

Join a server, if it doesn't works disconnect and repeat the steps listed above.

VAC proof since it doesn't alter any files and is purely a cvar exploit.

Following the above instructions will make you immune to flash grenades and will allow you to see through smokes much more clearly. Bear in mind that this exploit may work fine now but will most likely be purged in the next update on Friday.

Matt

Upcoming changes will shake you!

After the latest CS: GO update the beta has been tremendously active. The changes seem to have ticketed many boxes and the community seem generally pleased with the progress.  Today the CS: GO development team tweeted some intriguing news implying that another update will be arriving soon and will contain something “that will shake you”. Speculations to what this new shocking change will be are cluttering the forums as gamers await the mysterious update.

How to get in the CS:GO Beta

One of the most efficient ways to get in the Counter Strike: Global offensive Beta is to complete the Survey which has been supplied by steam.

Click this link to take the survey.

You will need steam to open it and it will ask you questions about hardware you would use to play the beta on. Filling in this survey doesn’t guarantee you a place in the beta but is the most effective way. In addition to this make sure you spend some time playing the previous Counter Strike editions as this may aid your application.