Valve released the official version of CS2 on the 27th of September 2023.
Topic: CS2 Official Drop! Now available for everyone, free to play.
It's time for Counter-Strike 2, the official release just happened. An update of around 5,7 gigabyte brings the long awaited new features like case unboxings, new skin previews, a CS:GO music kit and badge, as well as a store feature and weekly care packages where you get drops after your first weekly uprank. Furthermore, some skins and stickers got fixes. Check out your skins to see them yourself!
What does that mean for CS:GO?
You can no longer open CS:GO via Steam, the game seems to be completely disabled, making CS2 the new and only Counter-Strike game you're able to play.
What's new?
First of all when starting the game you will see two new main tabs in the CS2 menu - "Store" and "Watch matches and tournaments" got added. With that you can now see your recently played matches as you were used to in CS:GO. Furthermore, you can also download matches.
The store page is new and looks quite different than in CS:GO, on top you have a weekly care package, where you can select two out of four possible drops after the first rank up of the week. You can also buy all capsules, stickers and music kits that are available via the in-game market, nothing really changed there in comparison to CS:GO apart from the layout.
What's interesting: Paris 2023 Major capsules are back for sale in CS2!
CS:GO Badge and Music Kit!
When starting the game you will receive a music kit and a CS:GO badge to honor the beautiful times we had with the game. Actually a great idea and execution. They furthermore updated the look of the inventory, you now see your actual skins when scrolling through your inventory, with stickers applied to them!
All game modes are live!
Competitive matchmaking, wingman as well as private matchmaking are now available. The Premier mode will be played in seasons, but the time frame of those is still unclear. Your current CS2 rating got recent and you again need to play 10 games in order to get a rank! Furthermore CS introduced the following new updates to the gameplay:
- Improved player-against-player movement collision
- Improved consistency of bullet penetration
- Player reflections in water are now occluded by smoke
- Molotov fire now floats above the water
- Fixed character ambient occlusion being visible through walls
- C4 bomb lights don't reflect through walls
- Fixed some rare cases of viewmodel lighting corruption
- Adjusted smoke behavior to cover cases where smoke would stop less than a player's height above the ground
- Fix various bugs with switching teams in the middle of offline Deathmatch Fixed Famas reloading too early
- Chickens can finally fall off Vertigo
Cheating update!
Valve announced that when one or more party members of yours are convicted of cheating and banned from the game permanently all members of that party will lose their profile rank and rating. Furthermore, players with a very high rating are not allowed to play with accounts who do not have a ranking.
Conclusion
Overall, a nice update, we didn't hear of any major ingame changes or improvements yet. Many of you might be disappointed that there are no major content updates or introductions. We might see them in the upcoming days, time will tell! Have an amazing rest of your day and feel free to check out our most recent articles right below.
