- 25 Posts
- 526 Comments
1·11 hours agoBigger changes like vehicles and destruction would turn the game into something else entirely and even if they were only available in a side mode, I reckon Valve has numbers showing that not enough people would care enough to actually play it (like the Battle Royal mode, which I’m still salty they removed).
This all falls prey to the self fulfilling prophecy of only listening to your toxic competitive playerbase though.
Call Of Duty has a DIZZYING number of fun modes but it still has competitive Search & Destroy lobbies too, the only conflict here is in an actively hostile competitive scene treating any change even if it doesn’t effect the competitive modes as a threat to be dogpiled on.
Ignoring all the monetisation, which is basically a pipeline into gambling addiction for kids.
Also, I refuse to ignore this in any conversation about Counter Strike, it is fucked up.
economics
CS 2 is a free game, it is nearly a carbon copy of one of the first major popular competitive shooters and it has an intense amount of marketing around it for esports.
I think the game would have had to actively been sabotaged to not have a playerbase at this point.
Global Offensive was a paid game, Counter Strike 2 is a free game, I would obviously expect more people to play a free game than a paid one.
shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.
It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.
All of this casino crap is just attempting to forestall the inveitable that the community will not let anything change because the developers self-selected for a community of players that are toxic about any kind of change even if it doesn’t effect them.
Eeew they got rid of surfing/made it way slower?
I would be way more disgruntled about this if Xonotic didn’t exist, that was one of the few spontaneous aspects of CS that I found fun to explore on custom servers.
No, CS needs to evolve, the core competitive mode can stay the same but the game will continue to lose players if it doesn’t add other content and if it refuses to actually grow in anyway other than its predatory monetization schemes…
CS core is so solid that we could even play the same unchaged maps for another 20 years and would gradually play them differently year over year. i know this, because we did.
Yeah, good for you and the narrow things you want out of FPS games! That sounds soul-crushingly boring to me given all of the fun new FPS games that have come out over that period that have been way more rewarding, dynamic and interesting to experience.
I am not saying your experience is invalid, I am saying it is boring in most people’s opinion. Competitive focused players who enjoy playing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again don’t understand they aren’t the entire playerbase or that they also aren’t enough to really sustain a game either. To be honest in my opinion this is one of the most insufferable aspects to playing a game with a competitive community in it and why sometimes I purposefully avoid games like that given how those players are usually very vocal, hate anything new and will reliably be toxic about the game growing in different directions even if it doesn’t effect the modes they play.
A good counterpoint to this is Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress 2 has competitive elements but it is also just a fun game, it has lots of fun different modes and lots of different content. It isn’t just a minimal core competitive experience with some casino crap strapped on to make it look flashier, TF2 is so much more than that and frankly CS2 isn’t.
I don’t like Live Service games either, which is why I don’t like Counter Strike because it is like a Live Service game except no new actual content is ever added, just loot boxes, casino mechanics and carrots on sticks that exist outside of the actual gameplay.
You aren’t understanding my point, I specifically said I understand there being a competitive core that remains essentially unchanged.
What I am saying that is not nearly enough, it is lazy, you don’t have to change the core game to add more aspects to it, more modes and more content that compliments the competitive core.
cs itself evolved for a long time without any input by valve at all, the same way chess or modern soccer evolved without drastic changes.
Yeah and I played a bunch of chess when I was younger and got bored because it was the only good board game anyone would play with me. I stopped playing board games period for a decade or so and it took modern board games including modern abstracts to get me into board games again. Does that mean I saw absolutely everything there was to chess and that it needs to be updated now? No, but I am very much in the majority of people in feeling that chess is kind of boring after awhile, and if it was the only option to play with chess pieces and a chess board I just wouldn’t own a chess set which is why I don’t own a chess set…
I own Agricola, Concordia, Dominion, Spirit Island, Bonfire, 51st State, Hive and other complex modern strategy board games and enjoy them 1000x more than I ever would chess unless I was matched with someone precisely at my skill level and even then it just doesn’t hold me forever, I get bored and want something new.
Also… people do use footballs for all kinds of silly stuff that isn’t literally a football game? Soccer/Football is surrounded by a vibrant culture of games, interaction and play, just because the core sport is a rigid form doesn’t mean the entirety of the fun of kicking around footballs is rigid like that. Go to any random community on earth and chances are you can find a football being kicked around in an informal way, it is the opposite of Counter Strike in my opinion in that sense.
Just to clarify I am not saying I don’t understand there being a core competitive game that is meant to stay relatively unchanged like a sport… but CS2 doesn’t have destructible environments, it doesn’t have vehicles, it doesn’t have any innovation at all other than being more like a slot machine than the last Counter Strike which was basically the same as the Counter Strike before it.
A game this big I expect to have a core competitive minimal core that stays relatively unchanged, yes, but I also expect a bunch of more fun, varied and changing stuff surrounding it that keeps most players actually engaged who aren’t fully committed to an endlessly repetitive sweaty grind. No I am not talking about skins and shit, it makes me want to vomit even looking up that stuff and how many results you get for how to “invest” in CS skins (eeeeewww wtf?) I mean actual different gameplay with novel experiences to sustain and compliment the competitive unchanging core….
I see modern Counter Strike as a natural next step of de-evolution of FPS design in late stage capitalism. Halo 3 was the last time a big budget FPS game company really tried to wow players not simply addict them with casino mechanics and dark patterns. Halo 3 had splitscreen multiplayer, full co-op campaign, vehicles, custom multiplayer match settings galore, forge mode… the list goes on.
Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4 then roared onto the scene and demolished that practice by showing business suits in the industry who didn’t give a shit about videogames that you didn’t have to try that hard, you just needed addictive carrots on sticks like giving players a purposefully hamstrung weapon and making them grind to make it fun to use…
Counter Strike 2 is the natural endpoint of that process and it just makes the game come off as tired and boring to me.
Is Counter Strike ever going to innovate or just keep monetizing with empty fluff?
I got bored in the 1.6 and CS Source days, are people even playing different maps or is it still the same 5 maps over and over and over?
This is like watching someone turn an especially satisfying lever toy with a great tactile CA-CHUNK when you pull it into a slot machine over the course of 25+ years without ever changing or adding substantially to the toy mechanism/lever part of the machine.
5·7 days agohmm I can definitely do this with my Supernote A5 eink tablet.
Both Inkscape and Gimp can open multipage pdfs as seperate pages too… yeah that is directly editing though.
11·11 days agoah yes, this week on “Who Can Be Shittier, The US Or UK?” we cover the Palestinian Genocide, as the show does seemingly every week.
3·16 days agolong response
Ok I am bitter, I loved playing the support class and building fortifications and that part of the gameplay felt like it was so ignored by the developers that players on your team would start getting toxic with you if you built them.
To be fair often there was no point, a smg rush player could spawn in with c4 and eliminate the whole fort within 30 seconds of spawning in. I wasn’t roleplaying it or anything, the fortifications I built were always practical but the way the basic gunplay was balanced severely penalized moving slow and carefully in basically every respect except having a smg and moving a tiny bit slower than the enemy who would also have an smg.
I say that to give context, I think Battlebit could definitely come back in popularity, the biggest issue in my opinion is the lack of focus on mod support and it makes me question the longterm goals of the developers here compared to say Easy Red 2 or Operation Harsh Doorstop. If Battlebit had focused on allowing easy modded community servers to pop up, their inability to balance the gameplay to support a variety of playstyles could have been mitigated by the community, but they just kept making the wrong decisions in my opinion.
The sniper nerfs were enraging too because yeah, everyone hates snipers in a battlefield game but it isn’t that people hate the sniper class because it is OverPowered it is that people hate when most of their team is roleplaying being a sniper 3000m from the relevant part of the map occasionally making a crazy long shot that will make a cool clip. Because this is the easy meme to make fun of the battlefield sniper role, the developers nerfed that ability of the sniper class HARD with Halo sniper rifle like bullet trails and very obvious scope glint.
The facepalm thing about it for me was that when snipers would play this role… it was infuriating to be on their team BECAUSE they are contributing nothing to winning the objectives or really even to supporting the other players flanks and backing them up. So… why nerf it? Snipers are extremely important in a well balanced Battlefield game because they allow you to project power from an advantageous position over long distances or they allow you to project power into a space without physically having to be in it.
When a sniper “pushes” an objective their role isn’t to actually BE IN the circle capping the objective unless they are very close or there aren’t enough close range class players to capture the objective. Their role is to get a good angle on the objective and any relevant terrain around it, so that they can ensure their team is able to secure and hold the objective.
It was very clear that the developers didn’t seem to understand or value this role in the gameplay of their Battlefield-like, which ok that is one thing but they also clearly didn’t have a good system to get consistent feedback from a broad section of their playerbase so that they could correct course when they blundered like they kept doing.
It is a shame because what people really wanted was an approachable, low graphics requirement, large social Battlefield game and it isn’t like the game ever had to be perfectly balanced competitively to fit that role. The balance just went sooooo far out of whack it became less interesting and fun for a lot of the playerbase, and the core part that was being listened to didn’t notice until the lights were being turned out…
A community server with a mod that fixed these issues could have easily saved the community around this game even if the developers “abandoned” the game for awhile ughh.
I don’t think Battlebit is dead though, I would be surprised if development totally stopped as there just aren’t a lot of good alternatives. Well there is Easy Red 2. Yeah nevermind, just go play Easy Red 2 instead it is better in every single way basically.
I think that is how people active on the Discord community perceived it from their perspective, but it was not at all how I experienced Battlebit die as an initial huge fan of the game.
The gun balance came utterly unhinged because the developers weren’t actually interested in reaching their fans and listening vs. just using Discord and assuming that accomplished it, and it became frustrating to play any other style than mindless rush smg medic because squeakiest wheel gets the grease…
Once the backlash and drop off in playtime started coming from the broader playerbase not terminally tuned into Discord, the developers were basically blindsided and unable to adapt so they functionally abandoned the game.
If you are Discord-brained indeed what your complaint about Battlebit would be is that the developers abandoned the game but that doesn’t speak to the context at all in my opinion.
212·16 days agoGreta Thunberg
It is so infuriating espeically when any attempt to interact with the community around the game is met by the developer or community members saying “Ha! Silly you! The only place to socialize about this is Discord!”.
I have hated the fact that Discord was eating all the communities I love from the beginning, but this long into this nightmare what I find so frustrating is game developers who rely on Discord for feedback and to get a sense of where their community is at, pretend that the subset of people who use their Discord is broadly representative of the people who buy and play their game when it just isn’t.
Battlebit is a great example of a multiplayer game that only listened to its most active members on Discord who wanted a rush style arcade high intensity flavor to the combat and facilitating those players above all else lead to the entire rest of the game becoming unbalanced. When backlash started to happen, the devs again only listened to the SMG rush style players who were constantly vocalizing in the Discord and making highlight clips from it and stuff so the solution was to further nerf sniper players because that was the class SMG rush style players hated the most.
The game is dead now and I can’t think of a clearer example of how Discord can be a major liability to a game community rather than a boon.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/671860/BattleBit_Remastered/
I am not even sure the developers realize even now this was one of the major contributing factors to the collapse of the multiplayer community around their game which is even more frustrating.
762·29 days agoThis is genuinely a new era in gaming, so exciting!
16·29 days agoCorrect, to put things into precise terms, the corporate too-big-to-fail gaming industry is unable to make a profit in the gaming industry if there is any functional competition at all, even competition from indie game companies with much smaller budgets.
Just because large corporations with no desire to just let artists make art cannot make a sufficient profit unless boosted with the artificial advantage of having the rest of the industry destroyed… doesn’t mean that there are too many video games out there to make money from making another one it means large corporations suck at making good video games and are unable to keep systems of upper management from undermining everything redeeming about them.
Except this line of reasoning is empty and it will only ever be wielded by games journalism and large gaming companies to convince you to adopt the streaming model of gaming where you don’t ever buy any games. They will make you feel like you are being so much less wasteful, because oooooooh think of the horrorable backlog of unplayed games you would have owned otherwise!?!?!!
The thing is, who cares if you never play all the video games you buy? Video games are art for fucks sake, it is ok to buy them because you love artists even if it doesn’t materially change your life, you can still be happy about having collected the work of art, ESPECIALLY when it is in digital form.
I am so tired of this “my backlog is too big crap”, nobody cares, great you have a big backlog stop going along with the narrative that we need to “spotify” gaming to solve this “problem”.
I don’t want to roleplay fighting in the Ukraine war as realistically as possible, I am just making a joke.
I have seen Steam Decks pop up in several videos from Ukraine’s military, it seems like one of the handheld computers they commonly use which is cool.