The latest update for Counter-Strike 2 introduces a lot of exciting features and improvements.
The Arms Race mode is finally back along with the maps “Baggage” and “Shoots”. The skins enthusiasts will appreciate the Kilowatt Case and Kukri Knife with original finishes, along with flexible sticker placement and expanded sticker support. The Gameplay has also changed slighlty including a reusable Zeus that now can be used again after a 30 second cooldown instead of being a one-use investment as well as improved smoke mechanics, and various bug fixes.
Changelog
ARMS RACE
- Arms Race has been added to the available game modes.
- The maps “Baggage” and “Shoots” have also been added.
WEAPON FINISHES
- The Kilowatt Case has been introduced, featuring 17 community-designed weapon finishes.
- The Kukri Knife with original finishes has been added as a rare special item.
- Various bug fixes and tweaks have been made.
STICKERS
- The Ambush Sticker Capsule is now available for purchase.
- Support for flexible sticker placement has been added. Stickers can now be placed at user-specified positions and rotation when applied to weapons.
- All weapons now support up to five stickers.
- A zoom feature during sticker placement has been added to allow for higher precision sticker application.
- Various bug fixes and tweaks have been made.
MUSIC KITS
- The NIGHTMODE Music Kit Box is now available for purchase in standard and StatTrak versions.
ZEUS
- Zeus has been made reusable in all game modes, after a 30 second recharge delay.
- Support for applying stickers and name tags to the Zeus has been added.
- The Zeus first person model position has been adjusted.
- A Zeus kill icon has been added to kill cards and post round damage report.
SMOKE
- Smokes now cast shadows.
- Smoke rendering and animation have been improved.
GAMEPLAY
- A “Refund All” button has been added to the buy menu.
- A setting to disable first person bullet tracers has been added.
- Silencers can now always be reattached regardless of whether detaching them is enabled or not.
- Player pings are no longer blocked by invisible geometry.
- Various adjustments to sub-tick shooting have been made.
- Several cases where players could silently drop down vertical surfaces have been fixed.
- The smoothness of sliding along surfaces has been improved.
- An issue where collisions between players were jittery has been fixed.
- To ensure loadouts are correct at the beginning of matches, loadout changes are no longer allowed while searching for Premier, Competitive, or Wingman.
SOUND
- An option to select an audio input device for VOIP from the audio settings menu has been added.
- An option to change your microphone threshold (the minimum loudness before we start transmitting audio) from the audio options menu, as well as metering for your current mic loudness, has been added.
- An option to listen to your own microphone from the audio settings menu to hear how you sound has been added.
- The M249 fire sound effect has been replaced.
- The Zeus charging, charge not available, and charge ready states sound effects have been replaced.
- Occlusion effects have been further reduced.
- Minor mix adjustments have been made.
- An issue where some player-centric sounds were being perceived as originating from slightly behind the player has been fixed.
NETWORKING
- Peeker’s advantage has been reduced in many cases.
- The amount of peeker’s advantage in the steady state is reduced by 16ms.
- The frequency of situations that lead to very large peeker’s advantage due to excessive command queue depth has also been reduced.
- The cl_ticktiming console command has been added that prints a report breaking down the various sources of latency.
- An option to buffer server updates and user commands by one or more packets has been added.
- This can be used to smooth over stuttering due to packet loss, at the expense of increased latency.
UI
- Support for separate main menu and item inspect background map settings has been added.
- “Baggage” and “Warehouse” have been added as options for the main menu and item inspect background maps.
- In-game team-only chat will now be prefixed with the team (e.g., “[T]” or “[CT]”).
- ‘XP Overload’ status, which is awarded to players who have earned all of their normal XP during the week (11,166 XP) and reached reduced XP gain, has been added.
- XP Overload status is attached to players’ names in scoreboard, main menu, death notices, etc.
- XP Overload status is awarded for a minimum of one week.
- Additional tiers of XP Overload status can be unlocked by earning all of the normal XP over multiple consecutive weeks.
- Agents with unique end-of-match cheer animations now have unique defeat animations as well.
- A setting to disable playing defeat animations for the local player has been added.
- More accolades have been added to end-of-match.
MISC
- The range of CS Ratings allowed to party together in Premier matchmaking has been adjusted.
- A case where high-DPI mice would result in jittery mouse movement has been fixed.
- Minor improvements to animations during demo playback have been added.
- Rich presence update has been disabled when running Steam Client in tournament mode.
MAPS
INFERNO
- Various gaps have been fixed and grenade collision has been adjusted to make grenade bounces more predictable.
- Texture blending has been adjusted to improve player visibility.
ANCIENT
- Grenade collision on bombsite B ground has been adjusted to make grenade bounces more predictable.
ANUBIS
- Holes in world at Lower Tunnel have been fixed.
- Collision on all pillars has been fixed so players can no longer pixel boost.
- Collision has been fixed so utility does not fall out of world on top of structure at T Start.
- Missing collision on steps at Street which would allow dropped weapons to fall out of world has been fixed.
- Visibility at CT spawn has been improved.
- Invisible boost ledge at Bombsite B has been fixed.
- Various gaps in the world have been fixed.
- Missing collision on stair geo at CT spawn that allowed weapons/bomb to fall out of world has been fixed.
- Missing collision at Fountain that allowed weapons/bomb to fall out of world has been fixed.
- Some doors not generating bullet decals have been fixed.
- Visibility issue at Street has been fixed.
OVERPASS
- Some collision that was causing unpredictable player movement has been fixed.
MIRAGE
- Collision has been added to prevent bomb becoming unreachable.
- Some collision has been adjusted to prevent a ledge/pixel walk.
- Player getting stuck when strafing on Middle Ramp has been fixed by simplifying geo of floor and wall.
- A clip brush from Apartments has been removed to improve flash lineups.
NUKE
- Some collision has been built to prevent bomb from getting stuck behind barrels.
- Some disappearing mesh has been fixed.
- Dynamic shadow clipping on characters at Vending has been fixed.
- Clipping in vents has been improved.
- Bombsite water has been fixed to have better reflections on low settings.
- Visibility issue at t-spawn has been fixed.
- Collision on ramp in Bombsite B has been fixed.
- Holes in world have been fixed.
VERTIGO
- Holes in world and other minor geometry bugs have been fixed.
ITALY
- Some collision has been adjusted to prevent players getting stuck in apartment.
OFFICE
- A case where players could jump on a wall has been fixed.
- A case where players could get stuck if they crouched has been fixed.