New update brings season refresh, bomb changes, new skins, and dogs

Counter-Strike 2’s newest update rolled out today, and it’s a surprisingly big one.

Obviously, Cache has been added to Active Duty in the place of Overpass, but we’ve all been preparing for that already. The headline change in this update is what they did to the bomb radius. It’s no longer pre-calculated the way it used to be. Instead, it’s now a shockwave that emanates from the bomb.

This means your old hiding spots won’t work anymore, but fret not; the UI now shows you how much damage you will take.

There’s a lot of arguing online over whether this is bad and whether it reduces the skill gap. An odd argument, given that all previous knowledge no longer applies to this update, and this just saves everyone time. Not to mention, they added a small form of skill expression to this update: looking away from the bomb now reduces the damage you take.

Except if you have 1HP, then you’re out of luck, unfortunately.

For some reason, you’re guaranteed to take 1 point of damage wherever you are, and that’s just the tip of the “bug” iceberg. You also no longer take armor damage from the bomb, which will reduce how often you’ll need to rebuy armor. Add on the fact that a few maps let you survive next to the bomb, and there are some serious implications.

The reason the bug was in quotes is that these could be deliberate changes to encourage CTs to save less and try more retakes, or, more generally, to encourage locking Ts into bombsites if a retake isn’t viable. It’s a lot easier to try that if you can survive the bomb near site.

It’s hard to predict the exact outcomes of this change, especially since it might be tuned further.

What we can predict, however, is that the new skins will be expensive.

Valve has refreshed the armory with new collections, Spy Tech & Arabesque. We don’t have much to add about the skins themselves; art is in the eye of the beholder after all. The only guarantee here is that the skins will be expensive, like every rare collection skin.

Here are the two rarest skins from both collections; they should give you a good gist of their themes.

The final change of note in this update is the community map refresh they do every season.

These are usually best left to players to explore so they can form their own thoughts and maybe fully embrace a new map as part of the game. Poseidon on wingman, for instance, is sticking around an extra cycle presumably due to popularity.

We’re breaking away from that school of thought for just one map, though: Shelter; just look at the screenshot.

They added dogs as hostages on this map, with the T-side trying to kidnap them. If that’s not motivation to try hard as CTs, we don’t know what is.

It’s really nice to see community members doing cool stuff in CS like this; it brings back at least a bit of that old Counter-Strike spirit. It’s a shame it’s a hostage map, since those usually get way less burn, but at least it’s cool.

Finally, to round out this article: Valve, please either patch the bugs or clarify the intended behavior. Thanks.