UKTerrorist

CS Past, Present and Future

June 18th 1999, the release date of Counter-Strike. CS has been around for over a year and a half - a bloody long time if you pause to think about it. But still, I remember beta 1 like it was yesterday. The exploits, the crashes and the distinct lack of servers. Playing on Cliffe's US server on your 56K and not caring about ping, just wanting a frag. The addiction and the fun.

The old skool players will know know where I'm coming from, that feeling has all gone now. The hype about this little known HL mod is still going, but that can be blamed upon the rest of the shit being churned out by the gaming industry. There is something wrong, either I am growing up or the PC games market is getting diluted with third rate, underbaked clone games. CS has got a lot worse since its inception yet it remains, and is STILL gaining in popularity after one and a half years. As you can see CS truly is a phenomenon for the PC gaming world. So much so it is being considered to being ported to the DC like Opposing Force.

Like my previous article I want to begin in the past and work up to the present and future. As I mentioned back in the early days of pre-beta 4 CS was cool. It was underground and you were part of something fun. In beta 1 there were like 8 servers in Europe and most of them were just temporary ones being hosted off some guy's office line. There were problems with the game such as the poor quality of the maps and more bugs than you could shake a stick at, but players were enjoying the new mod or the refreshing change from TFC, which is where I was converted from.

I think CS was a lot harder back then too - killing someone was a real achievement, you felt great. Because of the faster run speed (I think HLDM pace in beta 1) and less "realistic" gun action and gameplay, the game was fast - you had to think quickly to survive, especially on the maps back then. Those maps being being Prizon, Siege and of course Mansion.

For those that don't know. Prizon was a joke of a map of filled with buggy levers and ladders that didn't work. Then there was Siege, just a little titbit of info; this map was a direct conversion of a TFC map "Canyon Siege" which NOTH1NG created for a PC Gamer map making compo. Siege has been changed many times during its lifetime. It has been made from day, to night and back to day. It has had a new texture set (which I don't like as much as the classic), the garbage bin has been made easier to jump on, the sewer section has been added, the bridge has been ruined and fixed, boxes have been shuffled about and finally the APC is now drivable. The last map of beta 1 was mansion (think estate with less junk) which was a blast to play. You didn't want to be on the losing team I can tell you that.

So that was beta 1. Nowhere near perfect but fun to play nonetheless. At this stage of the game there was very little media coverage. Too busy with Q3 and UT I would think. After a few months beta 2 came out and added a lot more to the CS experience. Loads more guns, considerably higher quality maps. CS was sweet back then, in fact I'd say beta 2.1 was my favorite period of CS. The balance was good, there was no wacky netcode, (I was an HPB until beta 6 BTW) and the game played at a nice rate. After 2.1 there was also an official map pack release containing more quality maps, including my all time favorite, Zero Option by Poor_Yurik.

Around the latter stages of Beta 2.1 the beginnings of the hype was starting (this would be about late August of 1999), interviews with gooseman on a few tribute websites and so on, but nothing major. At this time I think if you were to ask a casual gamer they would not have heard of Counter-Strike, let alone tell you which game it was a mod for. But this was rapidly changing.

Early in September Counter-Strike moved from Planet Half-Life to Counter-Strike.net and Beta 3 was released. The size was rapidly increasing, now at about 20 megs became a chore to download on your modem and as it was an amateur operation there were very few mirrors upon the time of release to add to the whole shibang. Beta 3 also contained new things such as the radio and more guns and maps. Even at this point in time CS was still very buggy and there were lots of little things gave it an amateur feel, yet there were no negative feeling towards the game by the majority of the players.

The release of Beta 4 had a novel feel, in that it was being released exclusive to Gameplay / Wireplay and could only be downloaded from their servers. CS was getting serious at this point and the new gameplay mode of Defusion was a welcome addition to the mod and the new maps were all good fun. If you have ever played this far back you will be aware of the very fast play speed and better accuracy when running and jumping which was good fun because it benefited good aim and movement not spray and pray tactics. The clan scene was what I think helped CS a lot in its growth. Due to the very simple team play roles and objectives it's easy for clans to meet up and play. Also the measure of simple death match and team play objectives gave CS a great "pick up and play" feel. If you could play any FPS you could pick up CS quickly.

Beta 5. The mere saying of this makes most old skool CS players start salivating ;). If you never played 5.2 you missed out. A quick bit of background: Valve paid for Barking Dog Studios to help Gooseman out with the creation of beta 5. They fixed a lot of the bugs and added a lot of the things which you take for granted now, such as the better HUD and auto hostage rescue. They also added a couple of cracking new maps such as Train and Backalley. On the subject of maps CS had a perfect map cycle then. Quality maps such as Tire, Iraq, Docks, Prodigy, Dust, Siege simply put one was happy to play ANY of the maps in the mapcycle.txt. Gameplay was fast and furious and "knife rushing" was in its prime. For those that don't know knife rushing is the act of pulling out your knife when not in combat to run around and which gave you a 20-30% speed increase, but lead to funny instances when you rounded a corner into an enemy with his auto-shotgun loaded and ready for action! But back then, the knife was powerful and a slash or two would leave the enemy a bloody mess on the floor. And speaking of bloody messes that's one thing missing from 1.0 that I hope gets put right. Back then when you shot someone they would flinch properly and blood would spurt out everywhere and they would wobble about like in an old western movie. Quality.

It was not all perfect though. Rifles were, and have for the most part been the un-balancing factor in CS. Up until beta 6.5 the colt had a zoom function (like the AUG and SIG) which turned it into a DEADLY weapon long/mid range as well as a close range meele weapon. It was an unbalancing feature of CS. There was also the p90 which is under-used nowerdays. In beta 4 and 5 P90 "whores" was the term given to the t**ts who brought a p90 every round. It was seriously overpowered, 50 bullets of pure hold down the mouse button accuracy. You could literally wipe out 5 people in a group without breaking sweat. That was fixed in beta 6.

Again as mentioned in my other article the release of beta 6 was awaited with baited breath from the thousands of players. But when it was released it didn't feel right. The gun firing was all changed, rushing was a lot harder now the knife speed boost was gone and then there were the new gameplay modes. These were Assassination and Escape. All nice ideas but they forced the replacement of loads of seminal CS maps. The problem with these new gameplay modes is they forced team play to work. And by this time there were more newbies than ever before, which makes team play hard. Coupled with the fact that team play rarely occurs on a public server made these game play modes crap. I can understand where gooseman was going; trying to curb the death match style of play which emerged form the changes made in past betas but you just can't rely on total team play on a public server.

The community was not happy with CS and I think beta 6 marked the beginning of the downward spiral. There was the promise of the new Valve patch on the horizon. Said patch would "lower pings by half" and fix lots of Half-Life bugs, and add a load of new features. Sounds great! So beta 6.5 was release along side the new patch. Well beta 6.5 sucked harder than 6.0 but that wasn't the main problem. The main problem was the new netcode. I had just became LPB and hated the way the new netcode worked. It made everything feel like slow motion and was just weird! Of course the patch had been made to make life easier for HPB's and to fuck LPB's over, fair enough. But when I play as an HPB at my mates houses I still preferred the way the old netcode worked. What you saw was what you got. So you had another 100ms ping time over your opponent, tough. You would use strategy more so you could lure him into traps and take him down, you just had to aim slightly ahead. With this new netcode even as a modemer things aren't all peachy. You get teleporting still, (inevitable if you have a really poor connection) and you still get the "shot round corner" effect. Just now these same things affect LPB's too. You can get a nice play experience with people of the same ping times as you but it's odd when you get a mixture because you literally have to change the way you engage the enemy. Close range is the same but medium range and sniping is different. Sniping a HPB is much harder than sniping a fellow LPB, I don't want this article to be a cuss on the netted (that's for another time) so I'll leave it at that, all I'm trying to say is that I don't think this netcode has really helped HPB's all that much, at least from my experience.

As you can see I feel strongly about the matter and loads of others did too. At this point loads of the community bailed out or just cut play times in half. CS wasn't as much fun to play anymore. Then beta 7 came and was quite good in all honesty. It ditched a load of the maps from the cursed gameplay modes and added a few decent new maps, but these can't bring back the old time classics that are just a memory in the shadows of my mind. From beta 5 to this time the coverage in CS was at its peak. The online and offline magazines couldn't get enough and anyone who was anyone was discussing all aspects of the mod. Even if the hardcore players were jaded or bored with CS, thousands of new players continued to waste away hours of their life diffusing the bomb or guarding the hostages.

CS 1.0 was released in late 2000 and was the final dagger in the back for many of the older players in the community, and the reason for more players to check the Counter-Strike mod out. CS 1.0 boasted new animation for the player models, and complete reskinning. I'm from the camp that thinks that the new models have nice looking skins but have dodgy movement, and no flinching. 1.0 also included a few new weapons but none are really used, and finally it was released as a retail product to buy on the high street.

So there we go, that's the past of CS right up to where we are now. There are a number of issues I want to address to complete this article. First one being, where has the fun gone?

Lots of older players find themselves asking this question. I think the answer is more simple than we'd like to think. Like any game no matter how good you will find yourself getting bored of it after a period. And one and a half years of playing the same thing daily is bound to get boring. I think that one got bored less quickly because the "beta" aspect kept the promise of new stuff coming which added to the experience up to beta 5.2. But after then there was nothing to add, and the objects that were tested completely altered the game from what we had been used to. For good or bad it's happened, and thats the way it goes. One thing I like about 1.0 is the forced team play which is great for clan matches, but simply sucks for public servers as you have to rely on a team of mofos for backup. The release of 6.5/1.0 just increased the boredom for players like myself.

Homing in it is the following things that bother me with CS in its current state.

In beta 5 there was the over-riding enjoyment factor that made CS fun to play. You could survive on your own as a rambo no problems, but teamwork would also pay dividends in camp outs. In 1.0 it is so hard to run into a room of enemy and wipe them out, even as an LPB, you have to work at them one by one. In beta 5, even as an HPB it was easy to run in and waste the entire team, this is now gone I think due to the netcode, the firing physics and also the "push back". Now you have the netcode working against you as an LPB. If you see an enemy and take a pop and duck round the corner, look out to take another pop and pull back in you may find yourself having 30-50 health removed just after you have ducked back in, thanks. Also the firing physics have been heavily edited. There is a lot more recoil with the guns. I did a quick test and in beta 5.2 you could zoom in on the rifles and hold down the trigger for extended periods of time and the bullets would go where you pointed, they also went where you pointed when jumping and stafing better than they do now. All this means is that when you get in a firefight don't bother tap firing because your enemy will be holding down the fire button praying for a miracle ..and it usually pays off for him. Finally there is this really annoying "pinning down" / "push back" factor you get now which again makes fire fights a lot more random and harder for the attacker. When you get hit now you freeze, the bullet stuns you like it would in real life and movement becomes very hard so your enemy just has to keep firing in the same sort of place and he's scored because you can't pullback. In older versions this didn't happen which meant you could be hit and just keep on running, which made multiple killings a lot easier as you can imagine.

So if this game is so boring why do we keep playing? Again another simple answer, there is nothing else to play. Despite being old and tired the game is still relatively satisfying to play otherwise I think all the old timers would just give up now. One other thing keeping them going is the lack of other decent multiplayer, or FPS games to play. There have been no decent multiplayer games released since CS, (this in my warped, negative teenage opinion) so there is no new competition. Sure Q3 and UT have their share of players but there is no new big thing to steal the limelight. There are a few games on the horizon such as TF2, Halo and Tribes 2 for example. But as far as I know those games are far from release and if Valve and the PC market stays true to their capitalistic form they wont be released until Christmas 2001.

How long will older players put up with this? I don't know, what I do know is when the next big thing comes players wont hesitate to move onto that if it's half as good as CS used to be. As for the newer players, they will keep playing until they find it boring, the casual gamer is a lot more fickle than the hardcore gamer and it will be upto their individual level of interest how long they will want to keep playing counter-strike, time will tell.