After teasing us for months about CS:GO eventually getting updated to use the “Panorama” interface that Dota 2 has been using since its Reborn update in June 2015, Valve has finally released a public beta of CS:GO with the new UI up and running. This was one of our big wishlist items for CS:GO in 2018, and I’m happy to report that it's pretty darn good.

Admittedly, the bar has been set pretty low for Panorama, as the existing CS:GO interface is nothing to write home about. It’s looked more or less the same since the game’s release in 2012; a ton of game features and their respective menu options have been added since then, but the overall look and feel of the UI has remained pretty static. Big structural issues, like the fact that you can’t navigate any of the inventory or loadout options while you’re in a lobby with your friends, have been left unaddressed for years, and aesthetically it’s about what you’d expect from a game released in 2012.

Fortunately, those days appear to be behind us, as the Panorama update is a complete overhaul that replaces virtually every UI asset. Going through the menus in the public beta, it’s hard to spot much of anything that hasn’t gotten the Panorama treatment, which is a good thing, since the end result is a much more modern-feeling game.

The visual facelift isn’t the only thing Panorama has to offer either. It also introduces some clever new features, like a landing page that shows you recent news posts (a common and useful element in most recent multiplayer games), some new explanatory tooltips, and a handy table that shows you what your teammates have equipped themselves with when you’re in the buy menu. You can now navigate the various pre-match menus while sitting in a lobby with your party.

It’s worth reiterating that this is just a beta, and as such, not all the kinks have been ironed out yet. A bunch of the console commands don’t work properly, there are a couple actions that will get you stuck on an inescapable menu screen, and there’s something a bit weird going on with the way your crosshair is rendered. There’s a big thread full of bug reports on the CS:GO subreddit, so it may be a little while yet before Panorama is ready for primetime. Valve has already released its first patch for the beta version, however, and seem keen to get it ready for final release in short order.

What's not to like

There are also a couple stylistic choices that seem a bit questionable, and not being bugs, they seem unlikely to be changed before the update goes live unless the community gets extremely up in arms about them. Foremost among these annoyances is the background treatment for the new scoreboard; in the old UI, the scoreboard simply darkened the area of the screen it occupied enough for you to see the white scoreboard text, allowing you to see through it fairly easily. The Panorama version applies a blur effect instead, making it largely impossible to see your crosshair or any environmental details in the middle of your screen. For players who tend to compulsively check the scoreboard during the round, this is a big downgrade, and looks an awful lot like Valve trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.

Another head-scratcher is the inclusion on the main landing page of a big, animated player model right in the middle.This format has become pretty ubiquitous of late, perhaps due to its appearance in DayZ and PUBG, but it makes little sense in a game with, at the moment, virtually no cosmetic character customization to speak of. Surely there are more fruitful bits of information this screen real estate could be used for in CS:GO.

Minor quibbles aside, Panorama has survived the migration from Dota 2 to CS:GO remarkably intact. Given how enormous of an upgrade it is over the dated UI we’ve been using until now, one gets the impression of playing a whole new game upon first sight of the new main menu.

It’s a breath of fresh air to see Valve taking big steps like this to modernize CS:GO. One of the longtime complaints of the Counter-Strike community has been that despite boasting similar player numbers to Dota 2, it never feels like CS:GO gets nearly the same amount of love from its developers, and I suspect an update like this will help assuage that bitterness in the hearts of Counter-Strike’s crustiest detractors.

Here’s to hoping Valve can continue shipping substantive, high-quality updates like this going forward, and we can all stop reading snide HLTV comments about how Counter-Strike is a dying game.

In April, a study of loot boxes by the Netherlands Gaming Authority concluded four out of ten videogames considered fell foul of the country's gambling laws. And while specific games were not named at the time, the regulator body warned that "enforcement action" would be taken against any games that failed to meet legal requirements by June 20. 

That's today, of course, and it now appears loot boxes in both Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 have been deemed illegal. As reported by tweakers.net (via Reddit), players of both games were met today with a message from Valve detailing the sanctions. 

As posted by Reddit user hollandje, here's the message in full:

Dear Counter-Strike: Global Offensive customers,

In May, we received two letters from the Dutch Kansspelautoriteit, stating that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 contain ‘loot boxes’ that violate the Dutch Betting and Gaming Act. The Kansspelautoriteit accusation is different from how other countries think about loot boxes, so we hired Dutch legal counsel, looked at the recent Study into Loot Boxes published by the Kansspelautoriteit, and learned more about Dutch law. We still don’t understand or agree with the Kansspelautoriteit’s legal conclusion, and we’ve responded to explain more about CS:GO and Dota 2.

In the meantime, we have a threat from the Kansspelautoriteit to prosecute Valve if we don’t implement a remedy by June 20. The letters don’t tell us how to do that, but the Study into Loot Boxes does contain one rather simplistic statement:

"Loot boxes contravene the law if the in-game goods from the loot boxes are transferable. Loot boxes do not contravene the law if the in-game goods from the loot boxes are not transferable."

So for now our only practical alternative is to disable trading and Steam Marketplace transfers for CS:GO and Dota 2 items for Dutch customers. We apologize to you for this inconvenience. We hope that, after more engagement with the Kansspelautoriteit, they may refine their legal demands and we can find a solution that is less inconvenient.

This move follows Belgium's loot box injunctions, whose Gambling Commission also ruled against loot boxes in Overwatch, FIFA 18, and CS:GO in April. A deadline was not set in this instance, however it will be interesting to see how Belgian authorities proceed in light of the above.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive got a major visual update today in the form of the new Panorama UI. Valve described the overhauled interface as "the most substantial change to the look and feel of CS:GO since the game was released in 2012."

"From the Main Menu to the Scoreboard, the entire experience of interacting with the game has been updated," Valve said. Unfortunately, it's not actually finished, and so this release only supports the "practice with bots" option, either solo or with a friend. 

As Dot Esports pointed out, this is actually the second game to get the Panorama treatment: Valve gave Dota 2 a Panorama update last year. In order to check out CS:GO's hot new look yourself you'll have to opt in to a beta depot, which you can learn about here. 

The long story of Counter-Strike is a series of minor but meaningful changes. Track the last few years of patches, and between hundreds of weapon skins, you see subtle but serious modifications to map layouts, recoil behavior, and anti-cheat. If you time-traveled a CS player from 1999 two decades into the future to play CS:GO today, they'd find it familiar enough: the AK-47 is still the workhorse of the T-side arsenal, the Nordic countries are still better at the game than everyone else, and de_nuke is still in the active map pool. 

If things continue along their current trajectory, however, that last staple of Counter-Strike’s identity may be the next casualty of its ongoing evolution.

Of the seven maps in the current “active duty” map pool—that is, the maps available for players to choose from at big tournaments—Nuke is by far the least popular. So far in 2018, 214 matches of CS:GO have been played at high-level tournaments, and of all those matches, only nine have been played on Nuke. The next-least-played map sees over double the usage, with 20 appearances in high-level games over the same time period.

These numbers didn’t used to be quite so grim. The map saw more play back in 2014, when 15 of the 111 games played at major tournaments were played on Nuke, placing it firmly in the middle of the pack compared to the other active duty maps. Since then, its popularity has waned sharply, despite a graphical overhaul and substantial redesign in early 2016.

What happened to Nuke?

Radioactive

When I pose that question some of the game’s top-tier professionals, I learn that there’s not much of a consensus on why the map has fallen out of favour. Opinions range from believing that it’s a great map and that people just aren’t bothering to learn the unique tactics required to be successful on it, to believing it’s a fundamentally flawed map that can’t be fixed without completely reinventing it.

French pro Nathan "NBK-" Schmitt, currently of G2 Esports, finds himself close to the first position. “In general I think Nuke is a very underrated map,” he says. “I think it’s a very interesting map [due to] its layout, and that it's very different and unique compared to other maps.”

Questioned further, NBK- offered a hypothesis. “The main thing, I think, is that teams are either very good at it, or average-to-bad on it,” he explains. “So those teams that are average or bad on it are going to be 70-80% of the teams … and the teams that can play very well on it will get the map banned because it’s gonna be a 100% win against teams that are a bit lower.”

In other words, it boils down to how large the skill disparity is between the teams that actively practice Nuke, and those that don’t bother to focus on the map because it doesn’t see much play at major tournaments. The nature of the CS:GO tournament format is that each team gets to ban at least one map from being played during any given match, so for the teams that don’t practice Nuke, it’s a no-brainer to ban it when playing against a team that’s known for their Nuke play.

Nuke's uniqueness exacerbates this problem, too. The more ways in which the map differs from the rest of the active pool, the more bespoke strategies and map-specific knowledge are required to do well on it, and the more time a team would need to dedicate to practicing it if they wanted to catch up to the teams who already know what they’re doing on it. Nuke, with it’s unconventional bombsite placement and total lack of a traditional mid configuration, finds itself on the extreme end of the spectrum as far as divergence from the status quo.

The end result is that no one ever gets to play it except in the event that two of the few teams who do bother to practice Nuke happen to run into each other in a tournament bracket. Of course, this means that the map is stuck in a bit of a negative feedback loop. Because no one plays it, teams aren’t incentivized to practice on it, and because no one practices on it, no one wants to play on it when it comes time to pick maps during major tournament matches.

Vent

There are also criticisms to be made about the design of the map itself, from those with a less enthusiastic view than that of NBK-. Jimmy "Jumpy" Berndtsson, the current coach of Fnatic, finds himself in this camp.

“When they made a change, when they added the outer catwalk and everything,” Jumpy says in reference to the changes made in the early 2016 update, “I felt it was a bit messy in a way, because as CT you can hide in so many spots, and as T you can [attack] in so many spots.” This abundance of choices, he says, led to a higher degree of randomness in high-level play, because it became harder for players to know where they should be looking.

He’s more enthusiastic about the latest version of the map that was released in February, saying “With the new changes now, I really like the update … I think it’s more balanced in a way, you can push yard now and the CT can’t hide everywhere, and Ts can’t exploit going outer catwalk really fast.” It’s unclear whether these tweaks will be enough to break the aforementioned feedback loop.

Another issue raised—one that will be far more difficult to fix with minor balance updates—relates to the overall layout of the map. On a normal Counter-Strike map, the two bomb sites that the T side must attempt to reach are generally on opposite sides of the map from each other, with enough distance between them that it will take a player a bit of time to run from one to the other. Nuke, however, is unique in the regard; its bombsites are stacked one on top of each other, occupying more or less the same footprint, but on two different storeys of the same buildings.

“Because of the levels, you can go down under and you hear them from up top, sometimes you’re just really confused, like ‘Am I hearing him down under, or is he above me, or is he to the right or the left?’ I think that’s the most confusing part,” says Lukas "gla1ve" Rossander, current captain of Astralis.

There are serious issues besetting Nuke from all sides. Some have to do with the nature of the map itself, and some to do with the nature of competitive Counter-Strike and how the map pools and tournament formats work. None seem to have an easy solution.

Fission

The good news is, in contrast to the widely varying views from the pro scene on what’s wrong with Nuke, their answer of what to do about it is surprisingly unified.

“I guess three or four times a year we should just sit down with Valve and talk about what we could do better at the different maps, and especially Nuke, because there’s a lot of people not liking to play that map,” says gla1ve.“If they’re planning on introducing a new map, [I’d like it if they] released it a bit before the major, let people try it out, then just have a meeting with all the final teams at the major and talk about the new map and what their plans for it are,” Jumpy echoes. “I know they approach some people, but they don’t have like a big meeting, just to talk through, to let teams open their opinions. I think they can learn a lot from the players, and I think the players can learn a lot from the developers.”

Even NBK-, who has few grievances with the current design of Nuke, feels like there’s room for more communication between Valve and the pro scene. “I think [it’s] important for the players to talk with Valve and tell them what is not possible on a map,” he says. “For instance if they take something out of a map, or they add something, or they change something, if most of the pro players see it as a problem, I think that should be where Valve decides to change things and listen to the players.”

The consensus is clear: Valve still needs to do more to gather feedback from the highest-level players of their game, and use that feedback to make improvements that will increase the calibre of play at the top level. Whether that will be enough to save Nuke remains to be seen, but the pro scene believes that it will be a net good for Counter-Strike in general, and has at least some chance of being able to revitalize one of the game’s most iconic locales.