Every game engine has its defining, instantly recognizable quirk. When you think of Rockstar’s RAGE, you picture the flailing, floppy hit reactions from GTA 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2. With Bethesda’s Creation Engine, it’s the eerily blank faces of Skyrim and Fallout. The CryEngine set your PC on fire. And then there’s Source and its 2015 successor Source 2. For me, Valve’s engine will always be synonymous with the same thing: extremely dramatic, slapstick ragdolls. Shoot a Combine trooper with Half-Life 2’s crossbow and they’ll fly through the air like a giant, fleshy balloon – they look like those inflatable stick guys outside used car lots. Built with Source 2, Counter-Strike 2 has recently inherited the same, trademark body physics, but alongside tweaking Train, Valve has just toned them right down.
If you’ve been playing Counter-Strike 2 lately, you might have noticed that your opponents have gotten a little more… dramatic. Hit an enemy with the AWP and they’ll go skidding across the floor like they’re being pulled over an ice rink with a bungie rope. Blow them up with a grenade and you can probably check your watch, make a coffee, and rebind your keyboard before they land. Ragdolls in the FPS game have become seriously overreactive. The new Counter-Strike 2 update brings them back down to earth.
Valve says it’s “fixed a case where ragdolls could get created with extreme initial velocities.” The physics behind CS2’s character models are unclear, but it could be connected to how momentum is transferred from the player to the enemy – Valve mentioned this in its Half-Life 2 developer commentary, and explained how it tweaked the physics values to make running over zombies with the car in Highway 17 more satisfying. Maybe the momentum exchange got pushed a bit too far this time. You can see some examples of the slapstick ragdolls in the below video from ‘Itmemz.’
With the ragdolls fixed, Valve has also made a subtle but important change to Train. On the map’s eastern side, you have the little alcove that we colloquially refer to as ‘Hell.’ Adjacent to that are the CT tunnels, known as A1 and A2. The opening between Hell and the A2 tunnel has been widened. Exactly how much this will impact play remains to be seen, but in theory it gives Terrorists a clearer route out of the spawn into the A site. Conversely, it may also be easier for CTs to throw grenades in there.
Lastly, if you’re a stickler for details, the Counter-Strike 2 update also fixes a small bug whereby your character’s fingers would clip into the butterfly knife during the inspect animation. This stuff is important, you know? As for what else Valve is up to, there’s a new reason to believe that Half-Life 3 is on the way…
Get the latest and best CS2 crosshair codes, or check out all the best Counter-Strike 2 console commands and cheats.
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