Rejoice, Counter-Strike's grenades now sound crisp and clear as a chorus of angels—plus subtick shooting is either better or the fanbase is experiencing a shared delusion

(Image credit: Valve)

If there's one thing, one single thing, that's stopped me from going pro in Counter-Strike 2 all these years, it's the audio on those grenades—fuzzy and low-fi, like it was recorded by the Elephant Six Collective. Atrocious mids, swampy highs, lows with the callous insouciance of a neglectful husband*. I refuse to subject my ears to that.

Well, now I won't have to, and my CS2 career can finally bloom. In an update earlier today, Valve announced that the game's 'nades are almost irresponsibly hi-fi. They "now have unique higher-fidelity sounds for draw, inspect, pin-pull, and throw." Our long national nightmare is over.

Also, other things, but I fail to see how they compare in significance to our new crystalline 'nades. Most promising, I think, is the addition of cs_script, "a JavaScript based scripting system for Counter-Strike maps" that can now be used by community mapmakers.

This opens the door to a whole bunch of buckwild possibilities, like community-made custom CS2 game modes (you can see an example of the scripting language in action in this X post from Gabe Follower).

That aside, you can now peer at other players' loadouts while spectating, there's a new Genesis Collection of 17 skins—a fresh injection of stuff for the game's eternally absurd skin market.

Oh, and there are "various improvements to subtick shooting consistency," which has either been a huge improvement or caused an outbreak of collective psychosis among the CS2 fanbase.

By which I mean, it's easy to find players reporting back these improvements have entailed better hit registration for their guns in games, but very few of them are giving hard numbers. Without someone actually taking the time and tools to measure these perceived improvements, it could all be a case of the placebo effect. Still, hopefully it really has made the game feel better and we're not all delirious.

*Just for clarity, I don't know what any of this means.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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