Valve seem to have a renewed focus on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive lately, with a lot of regular updates. This latest one has some fun new toys.
Firstly, it now has a way for you to mark that you're available to play with others. This works across Competitive, Wingman and Danger Zone:
That feature is actually quite handy, when you want a full team ready but you're missing someone. Set that you're looking for players and CS:GO will now match you up with someone or a group of people.
Additionally they've now integrated HLTV, so you can watch live events as they happen directly in the game. You can also hit the star on events, so that they will show on the main menu so you don't miss them:
For the Danger Zone Battle Royale game mode, they've also now unlocked the final new perks when you drop in. You can select to be a Drone Pilot, which allows you to take control of a drone and fly it around the map. It can pick up loot for you, self-destruct and hurt enemies (although it's little too slow to explode to actually be useful), track down where enemies are by spying on them and so on. It's handy, thoroughly mixes up the gameplay even further and i think it's pretty fun but I'm not sure it's very balanced.
Also, it seems the actual Drone Pilot view has a bug on Linux, as you might be able to tell below when trying to drop something off to myself it's quite hard to see:
Pretty sure that shouldn't be there in the middle, it's very annoying - Bug Reported.
Additionally, the other two drop-in perks have also been unlocked which wasn't mentioned, which allow you to get more money based on either areas explored or each wave of the zone expansion you survive.
One thing they really need to do now, is sort out the startup time on Linux. Sometimes I honestly think it has frozen as it becomes unresponsive and then suddenly comes to life minutes later.
You can find Counter-Strike: Global Offensive free on Steam.
I agree with the startup time but this is actually comparable to HL2 (I recently replayed that). This isn't too surprising since CS:S was based upon the source engine and while CS:GO has improvements it is still on Source.
I believe this is source1 + OGL related and if they move CS:GO over to Source2+Vulkan we would see a massive improvement. THis is apparent with DOTA2, which is Source2+vulkan and starts up in no time & enters a game in no time. Likewise I recently had to run dota2 in ogl mode due to a buggy update and that experienced some slowdown as well.
There was talk about csgo migrating to source2 for last summer but there has been silence since then
woopwoop.I doubt they will be updating CS:GO to Vulkan in all honest, probably far too sensitive for a full Source 2 treatment with it being first-person unlike Dota 2.
I agree with the startup time but this is actually comparable to HL2 (I recently replayed that). This isn't too surprising since CS:S was based upon the source engine and while CS:GO has improvements it is still on Source.
I believe this is source1 + OGL related and if they move CS:GO over to Source2+Vulkan we would see a massive improvement. THis is apparent with DOTA2, which is Source2+vulkan and starts up in no time & enters a game in no time. Likewise I recently had to run dota2 in ogl mode due to a buggy update and that experienced some slowdown as well.
There was talk about csgo migrating to source2 for last summer but there has been silence since then
The next CS game though however, if they ever do it, would be likely of course. I do hope they do another CS game, while CS:GO is good it really does show its age.
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