I got the beta from the master valve key they hooked us up with for relic employees, i have only played for literally 10 mins so this is pureley 1 st impressions. Graphically it looks more detailed than cs source but there is still a sense of bspness to things, basically, it looks like a source game.
The weapon models look really bubbly/fat/large and didnt really impress, i think cs s default weapons lookway better. The new ui is.... Interesting, not horrible but not an improvement either. Gameplay is standard cs which is starting to feel a bit dated, the instinctual habit of aiming down sights in every other fps is feels missing even though cs has never had it, it adds to the dated feel. Gun spray/ recoil has changed but havent played enough to render a verdict on that.
The new crosshairs and general movement/ shooting feels different , like cs but off kinda, like i was playing with boxing mits on or something, might just be my mouse settings but it was immediatley offputting.
This post sounds super negative i suppose but keep in mind this is all just 1st impressions. Dust has never looked this good which is cool but its nowhere near as nice looking/ detailed as cod or bf3 maps. Which kinda brings me to my point, bf 3 is such a rich and awesome experience, this just makes me wonder why i would spend my time with this? It feels likr a reskin of cs:s with a hd visuals pack, where something was lost in the process, i dont know if its due to not being developed by valve, but something is off about it.
. And this is coming from a guy who played cs all through highschool, and for a while after 1.5-cs:s etc. I used to looooove cs but this just leaves me scratching my head as to why it exists as opposed to valve making cs 2, hopefully on a new engine. Color me and i really wanted this to bring me back to cs, but everything has beed underwhelimng since they 1st announced it, to me anyways.
I played for about 3 hours yesterday and I agree with everything PixelMasher says. I LOVED CS through high school and college but going back to play this re-skin feels odd. I have grown accustomed to scoping, sprinting, and being able to re-spawn. It felt like a giant step backwards. Even after 3 hours I couldn't stop clicking on the right mouse button to scope only to accidentally switch my pistol to burst fire.
As a former semi-professional cs1.6 player, the first thing I take issue with is the fact that I can't turn off the FUCKING MUSIC on the menu screen. I will post first impressions once I've played a bit.
edit1: tried to start a LAN game with bots, game leaves on me team-pick screen while the game starts and I cant do anything, unable to play or get menu, or quit game. Had to alt-F4. Good start.
Movement:
Feels like you're skating on ice. No precise control possible, it feels like CSS in that regard. Obviously no air control but did anyone seriously expect that anyway?
Weapons:
Granted its a beta, but I genuinely dont understand how they have managed to make CS feel like you're playing Half-Life DeathMatch. There is practically no kickback recoil on ANY of the weapons, you just casually hold your mouse button down with your crosshair directly over someones face the entire time and watch the tracers of your bullets randomly fly around them. There is no indication of where your bullets are gonna go at all.
Snipers are a whole other thing aswell. Whose bright idea was it to BLUR THE ENTIRE SCREEN when you're moving while scoped? Firstly, any player with any clue how to play FPS games will be tap-moving all the fricking time. I had to stop playing because it was beginning to strain my eyes when I started playing with awp.
No silencer on the CT pistol? Forgiveable. No silencer on the m4? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING VALVE!?!
Balance:
You can't buy half armour anymore ?! (kevlar body with no helmet). Why?! Seriously what was the reason for that, please tell me. This unbalances pistol rounds in favour of CT so badly I literally dont understand how it happened. I mean let-alone allowing 2nd round T buys with a plant, with AK half armour. Just reducing the complexity of the game arbitrarily in yet another facet.
And don't even get me started on map changes, jeez. I appreciate a lot of this stuff is similar to css but .... utterly, radically changed the way the maps play. Which when you're talking about maps like dust2 I just dont understand.
In summary - I dont know how Valve let yet another CS game get to this state. I mean I didn't like CS:Source .. but I played it, and I competed in it for a good couple of years before I finally gave up on it. I don't even want to start playing this. Ranked matchmaking is literally the only positive thing that I see in it.
The bottom line is that as a company, they (Valve) don't follow the same strategy that other companies follow (moar graphics!), so why are you surprised?
Because you'd generally expect that if they havent been concentrating on making the graphics good, then they'd be concentrating on making something good about the game. What they've given us, judging by the beta, is yet another flop which clearly illustrates that after 11 years and 2 previous attempts - they STILL dont understand why the original Counter-Strike was successful.
Blurring vision while scoped, if this was done as some kind of deterrent to moving while scoped I can see that as an ok idea but because of recoil that was never a massive issue anyway, the most extreme was probably a duckjump into a stationary shot (in 1.6), right?
To make fairly big map changes could be interesting given time, although i can totally understand the annoyance that comes with changing things like that... itd be nice to see how the metagame pans out around these elements though, and same goes for the molotov and the knock on effect that will have.
If you looked at Counter strike / starcraft and CS:GO and SC2 then i wouldn't say that CS has anywhere near (if any at all given that its a FPS) as many elements that artifically increase the difficulty to warrent an "update". With starcraft APM was obviously a huge issue and the fact that you could only select 12 units / not select multiple buildings are borderline bad / tedious design elements. While they make for an insane skill ceiling its akin to making FPS games harder by using QWOP's gameplay of controlling limbs... its not the point.
Long story short, from an outsiders POV, CS is almost perfect at doing what it does, same as Q3 being almost perfect as a DM game...
I guess its interesting to play with mechanics like the molotovs? (almost only this) but id much rather see it either pushed a lot further i.e. TFC > TF2 rather than potentially butchering whats already fucking amazing.
Iceworld was the first cs map I ever played. And the only map I played for a good four or five days.
Basically I was on german exchange, and my exchange was a big CS player, he showed me the game and we played for hours taking turns on iceworld. It was seriously jumping into the deep end!
Probably a stupid suggestion, since I'm not used to cs console, and have no idea how similar the HL2 based consoles are to Q3A, especially since they're far from based on that particular game, but try s_musicvolume
that might be nice, if the game had an accessible console. if anyone figures out how to toggle it on please post it up.
As a hardcore CS player back in the day...this game utterly fails at everything. It does not feel like Counter-Strike at all. I know this is a beta, but for a company like Valve to release a game that sucks this bad, even in a beta stage, is really surprising. Everything stinks.....how did they think this would be good? The thing that might even bug me the most is the UI...it's SO BAD.
What MAKES it bad? I bet the UI has keyboard hotkeys, so that's easily overlooked I imagine seeing that you'd use those anyways.
What marks said was spot on. The whole firing system, cupped with the movement just makes the whole game feel wonky. There is no "feedback", you just feel like your gliding everywhere.
Its less that there are specific things that make the game BAD ... its more like, they took all the things that made CS great. And broke them. Catastrophically.
I was quite excited for this but you guys are making it sound like a big sack of salt... Most of the videos I've seen of it make it seem like what they've been going for; CS:S mixed with 1.6. I don't get how they could mess up the movement and firing so badly...
Damn sounds like the majority aint loving it too much. But hey thats the point of a Beta!
All movement issues of course will be tweaked. Even if it takes multiple updates after release.
I shouldnt tease CS:Go attempt at upresing CS, but this image is great.
*Pro Tip for hiding cheap BSP Brushes*
Just add random bricks into edges :P
Replies
can we can screenshots?
I was a massive CS fan. 1.5 REPRESENT. 1.6 not so much
My computer didn't really like steam and then CS:S came out and I was left behind.
I moved onto halo2 and the rest is history.
when I did get a comp. to play CS:S i didn't like what it had become. maybe it was me?
I'm looking forward to trying this one out. shame there's no way into this beta :O
Same here! ::poly122::)
The weapon models look really bubbly/fat/large and didnt really impress, i think cs s default weapons lookway better. The new ui is.... Interesting, not horrible but not an improvement either. Gameplay is standard cs which is starting to feel a bit dated, the instinctual habit of aiming down sights in every other fps is feels missing even though cs has never had it, it adds to the dated feel. Gun spray/ recoil has changed but havent played enough to render a verdict on that.
The new crosshairs and general movement/ shooting feels different , like cs but off kinda, like i was playing with boxing mits on or something, might just be my mouse settings but it was immediatley offputting.
This post sounds super negative i suppose but keep in mind this is all just 1st impressions. Dust has never looked this good which is cool but its nowhere near as nice looking/ detailed as cod or bf3 maps. Which kinda brings me to my point, bf 3 is such a rich and awesome experience, this just makes me wonder why i would spend my time with this? It feels likr a reskin of cs:s with a hd visuals pack, where something was lost in the process, i dont know if its due to not being developed by valve, but something is off about it.
. And this is coming from a guy who played cs all through highschool, and for a while after 1.5-cs:s etc. I used to looooove cs but this just leaves me scratching my head as to why it exists as opposed to valve making cs 2, hopefully on a new engine. Color me
Seems pretty on par from what id gathered from watching the beta gameplay footage.
edit1: tried to start a LAN game with bots, game leaves on me team-pick screen while the game starts and I cant do anything, unable to play or get menu, or quit game. Had to alt-F4. Good start.
Probably the worst FPS game I've ever played.
Movement:
Feels like you're skating on ice. No precise control possible, it feels like CSS in that regard. Obviously no air control but did anyone seriously expect that anyway?
Weapons:
Granted its a beta, but I genuinely dont understand how they have managed to make CS feel like you're playing Half-Life DeathMatch. There is practically no kickback recoil on ANY of the weapons, you just casually hold your mouse button down with your crosshair directly over someones face the entire time and watch the tracers of your bullets randomly fly around them. There is no indication of where your bullets are gonna go at all.
Snipers are a whole other thing aswell. Whose bright idea was it to BLUR THE ENTIRE SCREEN when you're moving while scoped? Firstly, any player with any clue how to play FPS games will be tap-moving all the fricking time. I had to stop playing because it was beginning to strain my eyes when I started playing with awp.
No silencer on the CT pistol? Forgiveable. No silencer on the m4? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING VALVE!?!
Balance:
You can't buy half armour anymore ?! (kevlar body with no helmet). Why?! Seriously what was the reason for that, please tell me. This unbalances pistol rounds in favour of CT so badly I literally dont understand how it happened. I mean let-alone allowing 2nd round T buys with a plant, with AK half armour. Just reducing the complexity of the game arbitrarily in yet another facet.
And don't even get me started on map changes, jeez. I appreciate a lot of this stuff is similar to css but ....
In summary - I dont know how Valve let yet another CS game get to this state. I mean I didn't like CS:Source .. but I played it, and I competed in it for a good couple of years before I finally gave up on it. I don't even want to start playing this. Ranked matchmaking is literally the only positive thing that I see in it.
Because you'd generally expect that if they havent been concentrating on making the graphics good, then they'd be concentrating on making something good about the game. What they've given us, judging by the beta, is yet another flop which clearly illustrates that after 11 years and 2 previous attempts - they STILL dont understand why the original Counter-Strike was successful.
(prefacing with - ive not played GO)
Blurring vision while scoped, if this was done as some kind of deterrent to moving while scoped I can see that as an ok idea but because of recoil that was never a massive issue anyway, the most extreme was probably a duckjump into a stationary shot (in 1.6), right?
To make fairly big map changes could be interesting given time, although i can totally understand the annoyance that comes with changing things like that... itd be nice to see how the metagame pans out around these elements though, and same goes for the molotov and the knock on effect that will have.
If you looked at Counter strike / starcraft and CS:GO and SC2 then i wouldn't say that CS has anywhere near (if any at all given that its a FPS) as many elements that artifically increase the difficulty to warrent an "update". With starcraft APM was obviously a huge issue and the fact that you could only select 12 units / not select multiple buildings are borderline bad / tedious design elements. While they make for an insane skill ceiling its akin to making FPS games harder by using QWOP's gameplay of controlling limbs... its not the point.
Long story short, from an outsiders POV, CS is almost perfect at doing what it does, same as Q3 being almost perfect as a DM game...
I guess its interesting to play with mechanics like the molotovs? (almost only this) but id much rather see it either pushed a lot further i.e. TFC > TF2 rather than potentially butchering whats already fucking amazing.
Iceworld was the first cs map I ever played. And the only map I played for a good four or five days.
Basically I was on german exchange, and my exchange was a big CS player, he showed me the game and we played for hours taking turns on iceworld. It was seriously jumping into the deep end!
that might be nice, if the game had an accessible console. if anyone figures out how to toggle it on please post it up.
What a disappointment.
What MAKES it bad? I bet the UI has keyboard hotkeys, so that's easily overlooked I imagine seeing that you'd use those anyways.
What marks said was spot on. The whole firing system, cupped with the movement just makes the whole game feel wonky. There is no "feedback", you just feel like your gliding everywhere.
All movement issues of course will be tweaked. Even if it takes multiple updates after release.
I shouldnt tease CS:Go attempt at upresing CS, but this image is great.
*Pro Tip for hiding cheap BSP Brushes*
Just add random bricks into edges :P