Classic Offensive

counter-strike classic offensive is neither cs go nor is it 1.6 it's a hybrid that seeks to combine the best bits from old counter-strike games with the newer ideas from cs go its goal is to become an open easily modable platform counter-strike started off exactly as this but has distanced itself from being that in recent years and more so every year the cs co project is headed by zul who has been working on it since 2015. i had a match on it last year and despite this still being inferno and despite still using the same weapons and equipment and the same familiar character models it was a different game and the match had that air of freshness to it that has been squeezed out as csgo has become ever more competitively focused even back then it seemed finished to me it's hard for me to find anything about that match that i played that didn't feel well polished and ready for player consumption but it isn't finished nor is it yet officially released because while the gameplay feels finished and polished you may be disappointed with the unfinished looking menu screen or put off by the broken game browser these are things that zul is painfully aware of and is in a frustrating position where he knows how to fix them but can't let's talk you through cs co's story back in 2015 zul took a guide on modding portal 2 and applied it to counter-strike which is something he thought nobody had tried before or if they had then they hadn't succeeded and sure enough it didn't work it kept crashing and he kind of gave up but then he tried again using trial and error by deleting files and folders to identify which were the ones that were causing it to crash he eventually got it loading and thus classic offensive was born this is a video event back in the earliest days of a project after he got it not exactly working but not not working and for anybody following in his footsteps you're in luck zul provides a tool called migi which does all this hard work for you link to that in the description but be warned you're going where valve doesn't expect you to dread and you may face the same uphill struggle that cs co has had in dealing with mod breaking updates and the unexpected u-turns to the core game during 2016 and 17 he continued experimenting with what he had created so still wasn't sure what he was trying to achieve he was just messing about with stuff to see which parts of the source engine were fixed in place and which parts could be bent to his will and if so then by how much when working alone he said that progress was fast but the scope was limited and so in 2017 classic offensive eventually became a proper thing with a whole team of people working on it and stuff everybody brought different skills to the table and then they all went off again to experiment with different aspects of the project here is a list of wonderful people who have all helped contribute to the project so far it's all focused on particles and model ports from older games xd shot focused on porting 1.6 animations to source order nissu helped make lots of weapon models bez the bot whisperer worked on the bots and klix did the lord's work by clipping dust two stairs and by making the rest of the map too for a while zul worked on the inspect button instead using it to add small animations where your character would just interact with the gun in fun ways like to twiddle with the buttons or to wipe the lens of the orp and so on but this idea was later scrapped as he decided it didn't contribute enough to the project it was too time consuming and he says was a silly idea right now he's wrestling with the decision of whether or not to have a crosshair on screen for the sniper rifles this is one of those things where there are benefits and drawbacks to whatever he decides to do and when he's done public polls on the issue the community seems equally divided guess they'll just have to try stuff to find out in 2018 one of the experiments was a single player campaign of some sort they made progress with this until it was killed off by an update to cs go that valve rolled out but their changes to the base game in turn broke what the cs code devs had been working on sloth squadron also played a part in this project unsurprisingly to design the weapon mechanics for cs co he says he wanted them to feel similar to their 1.6 iterations while still using some of the newer weapon mechanics introduced for cs go for example he still can't fully replicate 1.6 his recoil or inaccuracy systems but says that he has tweaked csgo's equivalents to help them to feel a little bit closer to how they used to be he worked on each weapon individually first by considering how they worked and felt in 1.6 and then by going from there pistols are one thing that has changed a lot the starter pistols have been made slightly less useless against armor but buying eco pistols will still be a better option and compared with cs go firing off a few shots in quick succession won't be penalized so greatly but if you spam the fire button too much then your accuracy will eventually go all over the place you may know of this famous pistol ace from 1.6 he says that given how csgo's pistols work it would be very difficult to pull off these days not so much in cs co though the wall banging mechanic in this mod has ended up being a hybrid between the two games you can't shoot through whole buildings like a 1.6 but props like crates are much more spammable than they are in cs go you won't penetrate far with most pistol shotguns or smgs but if you buy a rifle sniper or a deagle then they will be super effective at wall banging he thinks the meta will return to kind of how 1.6 operated where the aka m4 and orp takes center stage teams will have more options for ecos than simply buying deagles though and he says that every weapon will have some kind of purpose it's just that some will be more situational than others and there are numerous other changes to the base game as well the burst fire moting on the format and glock has been made to feel more reliable snipers can quick scope more accurately weapon tagging will slow players down more than it does in cs go the movement speed in general is higher than in cs go and high explosive grenades feel more powerful now an update a while back gave him the freedom to configure inaccuracy after landing which helped return the weapons more to how they were in 1.6 again where your accuracy immediately recovers the moment you land despite this flexibility sloth squadron is still very much at the mercy of what valve decides to do to the base game and these changes and updates can break what progress is made with the weapons and classic offensive he now hasn't done anything to the project in several years he got all the mechanics established and has since moved on from the project until he's needed again indeed the project has been in an operation for so many years now that a lot has changed in that time ideas have bubbled up and faded away again members have joined and left and the very concept of what classic offensive is has evolved along with all these changes everybody started out with lots of enthusiasm and progress was fast but things changed stuff slowed down members lost interest and life generally got in the way and made the developers busy with other things but by 2019 zul felt that he knew enough about modern cs go to start the project for real so he started it all again but with stronger foundations and with a clearer idea of what classic offensive wanted to become it settled on being what people would expect from a counter-strike roommate so they plan to remake all of the guns and animations to get a few map remakes done as well and then to get it all working nicely online he feels that a lot of what made the community so great in the older games has been lost with global offensive due to a heavy reliance on matchmaking which makes the whole experience less personal and much more competitively focused older games had more of a community feel to them which he believes revolved around the matches being found from the server browser screen this enabled people to find the communities which best suited them and they slowly grow to know everybody else there so classic offensive hopes to bring this back but with added face it integration the focusing heavily on adding fun stuff like the ballistic shield vip mode and a rocket launcher since zul believes that these sort of things will help sustain the community around this game by giving custom servers some fun variables to mess around with and to keep things feeling fresh and unique just ask waro what he thinks of this oh what the hell zul is trying to shape classic offensive into something that will appeal to two different types of people the first are the players who are still on older counter-strike games who have perhaps avoided csgo because they're disinterested in its competitive focus and the other would be former cs go players who have been there climbed the ranks done all that and now who just want to enjoy the community instead maybe for a casual match or simply to hang out with friends during 2017 the whale man designed these concept art images many of these paved the way for csgo's rendition of train here is how they compare with the current design this here is a 2017 edition of the dust 2 used in classic offensive and was later replaced with the improved version that you can see in the mod now but this early map helped lay the foundations serving as a valuable stepping stone between using counterstrike's pre-existing assets and the mod having its own definitive edition puffin designed these rather flashy looking images for dust too here is how they stack up against the final thing here is the concept art that the whale man did for nuke and this is how it looks in its current state the exteriors are mostly done but a mapper is needed to help finish the interiors right now the game contains three playable maps one is a remake of full day and then there are two proper diffuse maps being dust2 and inferno zul showed me this spreadsheet detailing the status of every map they have considered creating for this mod there are real stories behind some of these with the people mapping for them coming and going picking up where others left off getting so far with a remake and then leaving again and there are several like mirage and you can train which have reached further through development than it seems yet zul insists that they all still require more work before they're good to go he showed me train and i was surprised to discover that it was done or at least i thought it was but he still thinks it isn't that it needs another pass before it's fit for public consumption as well as having a number of its placeholder assets swapped out for custom ones he also showed me this i began to get the feeling that had anybody else been in charge of this project that classic offensive would have been released several years sooner and with a lot more content and no one would have been any wiser to the fact that most of it wasn't completely finished just like the maps i also hear that there are custom weapon models deep in development but they're still waiting for them to be 100 done before including them so when i say that classic offensive already features dust to an inferno you bet these maps are done dust2 even does this cool thing where it opens up this part of the map at the top of mid for deathmatch mode to make the layout flow better it's a really cool idea and a reference back to an early version of the map that used to have an indoor section just here of course all this is closed up again for defuse mode they would ideally like to get mirage done as well before officially releasing the mod mirage is currently being worked on by demiu who shared with me some progress picks the goal with the remake is to be faithful to 1.6 but not entirely because classic offensive and global offensives character models and maximum jump heights are different from how they were in that older game and so the height and size of the cover around the map also needs to be adjusted to cater for these changes in the source engine still he chose to base this version of mirage in a northern italy southern france style setting and added some memorable geometry like a clock tower and an open apartment area he has just finished working on ct spawn you can still see the same shoe shop featured here as was seen in canals and vineyard adding to counter-strike's lore the map itself is based mainly around inferno assets along with a few from dust there are also some made by the whale man for his map abby and the rest are custom assets made by demiu and squink the back of b-side has been a controversial area it started off like this as an interior but then he decided to open it up and to make it feel like it was on the edge of the town but that did require quite a bit of prop spam to obstruct vision lines between key places he also explained the difficulties in making middle feel like an actual place architecturally it just doesn't make sense for a place like this to exist is it meant to be a wide square or is it just a passage between places he thinks you need to take a leap of faith to make sense of some video game architecture but says that the mappers of this project have worked hard to get past these limitations where possible the problem with mapping for a mod like this is that there's very little reward to doing it talented mappers are best off investing the time elsewhere in maps which could later be featured in operations which at least has the potential to be financially lucrative and indeed some of the mappers who have worked on classic offensive have had great success on other projects since unfortunately with counter-strike not being the modable thing it once was the main issues with classic offensive have come from limitations in support zul says the classic offensive used to use the latest version of cs go but every few months it would receive an update that would break it in some way so the mod is now using an older version of the game from before all these problem updates he thinks that valve made most of these updates in the name of security you can no longer boot cs go from the exe file compatibility with obs is broken if you play on custom servers then it breaks certain things until you restart the game as all things valve have done these things to try and stop cheaters but says that cheaters quickly find ways to bypass such measures but then it ends up being a real problem for people who don't cheat ironically the only way that classic offensive can work around these anti-cheat measures is to hack the game itself brazil says he doesn't want to go down that route which would mean disabling vac and losing all of the legitimacy that goes along with having that zhul has made another mod too noble strike which you may know as being the halo mod for cs go he says there were a few reasons for making this it was primarily a test to see how far they could go with modding counter-strike without resorting to hacks since classic offensive scope was too limited whereas noble strike was utterly insane with how much stuff it changed from the base game despite releasing to considerable hype noble strike died about two weeks later which sur believes was down to the absence of a server browser and from its broken ui but he says there is a solution a solution to all of classic offensive's problems the weapons could be made more like 1.6 is the main menu could be made customizable configurable and complete and the server browser could be made workable if only they could get a license from valve one that would let them make these changes to the core game they last applied for this back in 2019 and were rejected zul suspects that valve is wary of a project like classic offensive which could be seen as a competitor to the base game even though he sees it more as a place for all the ideas that valve has chosen to reject they're in the process of applying for it again but zul is afraid of failure a lot of people have worked hard on this mod and it's getting to the point where being denied would kill the project outright and so close to the finish line and close to the finish line it is i spoke with several people involved on this project and you know how a project gets a feel to it classic offensives were so quiet that i assumed there must have been some hidden underlying drama within the group or an argument that caused the team to fragment at some point but no anybody who works on the project and left didn't really leave on bad terms in fact they're quite fond of the project it's just that it's progressed so slowly that most developers have drifted on from it and moved on with their lives one person who worked on it described classic offensive as being a 20 season long tv series where cast members come and go and describe it even as a right of passage that many mappers for counter-strike have passed through at some stage indeed the longer i investigated classic offensive the more frustrated i got at how much stuff seemed finished but wasn't and i pretty much told saul that if i was in charge of this project i'd toss a few almost finished maps into it and would release it as is but zul doesn't work like that this is his baby and he wants it to be done right he's all too aware of all the problems and limitations with it which remain unfixed all of the unfinished bits and all the problems they would cause if released in this current state he's released stuff before and he knows that releasing a project before it's ready can kill even the best of ideas and he insists that while the server browser is broken this mod will never get off the ground zul feels that getting more maps finished is a priority i suggested using 1.6 map ports as placeholders but he doesn't feel that represents what this project is setting out to achieve he wants proper map remakes which struck the same blend between 1.6 and global offensive as the rest of this mods mechanics already do but the biggest problem standing in classic offensive's way and the thing that's forever looming over the entire project is whether or not they'll be able to get a license from valve until then the panorama interface cannot be modified nor can they link up a master server to display the server list on he hates the idea that after all this work people will just boot up the project see a bugged and half-finished menu screen and will be deterred from going any further it would be such a waste there was a time back in construct beta when players would work through and around such problems but this is 2022 and people expect better competition from other games and media is far greater and the very slightest issues with classic offensive will be enough to put some players off the way is all czech this mod has one shot at getting it right if it's released in anything less than a stellar state it will soon drop off the radar again many people have invested a good amount of time love and effort into this mod and that would all be for nothing he doesn't want that wait come back here

Channel: 3kliksphilip

Views: 1,155,004

Keywords: counter strike, classic offensive, 1.6, source remake, port, zool

Id: VDr_jFEqngg

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 04 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/TheKrunchy]

This is such a cool mod, it sucks that they can’t get Valve’s support

[u/walter_socom]

I stopped playing it because no one would update. One night trying to play it there were four games in a row that fail to start after the five minute warm up in a row, all because there was one or two people that didn't install the latest update

[u/RudyOft]

I sincerely doubt Valve sees this as competition, but rather have become more cautious with releasing their source code to anybody.

[u/Salasarian]

wish they would 'feature lock' their current build and just work on getting rid of bugs for a playable release

i remember this mod dominating christmas season when it came out

[u/bodhisatta69]

A boy can dream...

[u/frigidds]

What a fantastic concept and project. Seems like it may be going through an issue that many startups have--not utilizing growth as a way to push the project forward, provide more visibility and resources, etc.

Funding and support from Valve are a huge stifiling issue, but regardless, it seems like getting players in the door NOW and generating community interest may be a necessary way of securing those two things.

Too many companies have gone under, because they try so hard to get their product perfect before shipping it out. The trouble is, that the BEST feedback you can gain, the BEST way to make a product amazing, is to utilize user feedback and generate a loop that 1. incorporates opportunities found only from a diverse playerbase and 2. establishes a line of trust between a community and its' leaders.

[u/zwck]

No obligatory "valve pls fix"¿‽

[u/aAa_Mac]

It reminds me CS Promod :)

[u/blixmc]

cool vid keep it up