Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of the best multiplayer shooters in existence — by all accounts an incredible game. Well, except for this one thing.
The hitbox, aka the part of a video game character where your bullets will actually harm them. Counter-Strike‘s are considered to be maddeningly janky, giving rise to occasional moments where it sure seems like you blasted someone right in the eye socket, but they act like their shoulder got grazed by a kitten’s eyelash. The community’s been grumbling about this issue pretty much since CSGO came out back in 2012. Finally, Valve’s seen fit to give it some attention.
Most recently, the hitbox problem caused public outcry when this video (as seen in the above GIF) made the rounds. Point blank fire into an easy target and… nothing. The guy lived to fight another day, but he decided to be efficient about it and murdered his confused foe the same day, approximately 0.5 seconds later. Infuriating.
The video rocketed to the top of the Counter-Strike subreddit, and pissed off fans — fed up with this absurdly longstanding issue — sent it to every Valve email and Reddit handle they could find. The result? Valve actually acknowledged the issue for the first time in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s nearly three-year lifespan.
They spoke with the terseness of a bullet to the brain, as is their way (for better or worse):
“It’s being worked on. We don’t have an eta.”
So that’s… something. It’s the barest sliver of something, crossing the finish line to something-dom with one millisecond left on the clock, but it is definitely more than nothing. Fans were stunned after being fed a steady diet of nothing for years:
Valve Time being what it is, it’s impossible to say when a fix will defuse this shitty situation once and for all. Here’s hoping it comes sooner rather than later, or sooner rather than later-er given the whole, you know, three years thing.
Granted, this might be a problem embedded in CSGO‘s version of Valve’s Source engine, meaning that it requires full-blown surgery rather than a quick fix patch. That could be what’s taking so long, but I’m only speculating. Still, three years is enough time to make an entire new game. Whatever’s going on, it’s time for things to change.
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Comments
8 responses to “Valve Finally Addresses Counter-Strike’s Biggest Problem”
Considering there’s been numerous video compilations sent to valve since launch I’m surprised they are finally acknowledging an issue! Maybe the game will be playable soon.
Possibly they have only just figured out a method of correcting it and we’re just keeping tight lipped previously because they had no idea
Wasn’t the game developed “jointly” with Hidden Path Entertainment?
I have no idea what jointly actually boils down to, but for all we know the development may have been mostly HPE, with valve helping with the Steam/workshop/marketplace integration.
Perhaps all of this rage should be directed at them instead of [or in addition to] Valve?
EDIT: Watching that video, I now know why I get owned when I play CS:GO; I clearly need to change my graphics settings to ‘N64’.
it’s mostly because people who want to be competitive play at 120fps, so some people deal with potato graphics to get it.
Was playing csgo today with modest specs maxed in 1080 on my 120hz screen and averaged between 150-200FPS. (AMD 8350 cpu, GTX 760 2GB, 16GB ram) not much reason to run in potato mode these days (I keep AA off because it blurs distant targets slightly and makes them harder to see. also motion blur because its just plain annoying)
The Source 2 launch is by all accounts imminent. I think this is an issue that they will fix once they transition over to the newer engine – if there’s no quick fix, it doesn’t make sense to fix it on an engine that will be abandoned soon.
Are they moving it to the new engine though? I think it’d be cool but, wouldn’t movement and all that be different due to a newer engine.
I hope so, never got used to movement in Source after all those years of 1.6.
If it does change it, I wouldn’t really expect it to change toooo much, I feel like certain tricks will have to be re-learnt