For 20 years, Counter-Strike players have worn generic character skins into their minutes-long matches. In-game terrorist factions like the "Phoenix Connexion" or "Elite Crew" have fought spec-ops groups like GSG-9 and the SAS. Through the immeasurable repetition of CS, these drab default outfits embedded themselves in the identity of the game. With Operation Shattered Web, that's changing.

"For the first time in CS:GO, unlock all-new T and CT-sided characters equippable on any map," writes Valve on a microsite announcing the update. "All-new CT Operators and T Agents are available as mission progress rewards. Complete missions and earn Stars to unlock them and equip them for deployment. Or equip the default Local Agent or Operator to use the pre-existing map-based characters."

The new characters are unlockable, equippable skins, essentially. There are 22 of them, and Valve uses rarity-like descriptors like "Superior Agent" and "Exceptional Agent" to distinguish them. The highest tier are "Master Agents," like Lt. Commander Ricksaw or Special Agent Ava of the FBI. These four characters come with special voice lines and animations (presumably third-person, end-of-match celebrations, not first-person animations). 

Shattered Web, CS:GO's first operation in two years, is $15. That's a bump from the $6 that operations like Hydra (2017) and Wildfire (2016) were priced at. These earlier operations mostly introduced new maps and modes to CS:GO, which Shattered Web also includes: Studio, Lunacy, and Jungle, each available in different modes of play. A package of new skins, stickers, and cosmetic graffiti are also available.

Update 2: It's official, Half-Life: Alyx is happening. Valve's long-awaited "flagship VR game" will be revealed to the world at 10 am PT/1 pm ET on November 21. The tweet comes from a relatively new account—created June 2019—with a small number of followers, and this is actually its first tweet. It's also odd that Valve would make such a big announcement over a channel that so few people were paying attention to. The official Steam Twitter feed, to compare, has 5.2 million followers. 

But it's verified, and the tweet has been retweeted by a few Valve folks, so we're confident it's legit: A new communications channel for a "new" kind of Valve, maybe.

We'll keep you posted. 

Update: According to a new transcript of the leaked interview, Half-Life: Alyx will be shown at The Game Awards on December 12.

Original story: This November 19 will mark the 21st anniversary of the release of the original Half-Life, and according to rumor it will also be when Valve announce a flagship virtual reality game called Half-Life: Alyx.

Valve are rarely interested in celebrating their own game's anniversaries, so take this rumor with a mouthful of salt. The source is apparently the same leaker responsible for the DOTA Underlords leak, and is quoting from an interview between "Geoff" (Geoff Keighley, in his capacity as the creator of the "Final Hours" documentaries about Valve games), Robin Walker (co-developer of Team Fortress 2 among other games), and an unnamed third person.

"March 2020, "Half-Life: Alyx" comin' out", says Geoff in the transcript.

Responding to the question of whether this game would be available for players without VR headsets, "I mean we would love to be delivering a version of this that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard, but like as we said, it began as an exploration of VR," an unnamed person replies.

As for how this entirely hypothetical game would play, the only clue is this statement: "You can see their whole body-- Respond to the situation. You know, panicking, dropping clips on the ground as they fumble their weapons 'cause a zombie's in front of them, all these things, they're just - it's been really fun watching playtests."

Valve have said they'll be releasing a "flagship VR game" this year.

I've reached out to Valve for comment and will update this story if they reply.

Update 2: It's official, Half-Life: Alyx is happening. Valve's long-awaited "flagship VR game" will be revealed to the world at 10 am PT/1 pm ET on November 21. The tweet comes from a relatively new account—created June 2019—with a small number of followers, and this is actually its first tweet. It's also odd that Valve would make such a big announcement over a channel that so few people were paying attention to. The official Steam Twitter feed, to compare, has 5.2 million followers. 

But it's verified, and the tweet has been retweeted by a few Valve folks, so we're confident it's legit: A new communications channel for a "new" kind of Valve, maybe.

We'll keep you posted. 

Update: According to a new transcript of the leaked interview, Half-Life: Alyx will be shown at The Game Awards on December 12.

Original story: This November 19 will mark the 21st anniversary of the release of the original Half-Life, and according to rumor it will also be when Valve announce a flagship virtual reality game called Half-Life: Alyx.

Valve are rarely interested in celebrating their own game's anniversaries, so take this rumor with a mouthful of salt. The source is apparently the same leaker responsible for the DOTA Underlords leak, and is quoting from an interview between "Geoff" (Geoff Keighley, in his capacity as the creator of the "Final Hours" documentaries about Valve games), Robin Walker (co-developer of Team Fortress 2 among other games), and an unnamed third person.

"March 2020, "Half-Life: Alyx" comin' out", says Geoff in the transcript.

Responding to the question of whether this game would be available for players without VR headsets, "I mean we would love to be delivering a version of this that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard, but like as we said, it began as an exploration of VR," an unnamed person replies.

As for how this entirely hypothetical game would play, the only clue is this statement: "You can see their whole body-- Respond to the situation. You know, panicking, dropping clips on the ground as they fumble their weapons 'cause a zombie's in front of them, all these things, they're just - it's been really fun watching playtests."

Valve have said they'll be releasing a "flagship VR game" this year.

I've reached out to Valve for comment and will update this story if they reply.

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

Each of the special infected in Left 4 Dead has its own musical tell. The hunter's is a tripping plink-plonk-plink, the spitter's got an eerie four notes versus the smoker's simple two, while the tank rolls up with its own miniature symphony. Play for long enough and you'll learn them all, but it's probably the witch you memorize first. Her musical sting is high-pitched and insistent, the first melody quickly joined by a second to create a sense of escalation. Even before you hear her sobbing, that tune plays and you know it's time to turn off the flashlight and step carefully.

Not startling her should be easy, but then the director plants her somewhere unavoidable, or your friend turns a corner a little too fast, or a stray bullet or pipe bomb catches her and that's it. She goes from sobbing to screaming and beelines for the survivor who startled her, fingerknives out as she knocks them down. She's not the kind of threat who'll take out a whole party, and eventually you learn to deal with her, but the terror of that shrieking attack is hard to get used to.

When you stumble across zombies in Left 4 Dead they're often just doing their own thing, leaning against walls looking sad. Until you bumble up waving your guns and one-liners around they just want to be left alone with their misery. The witch is the most miserable of the miserable, a goth queen whose sobbing is a warning to just let her be. Left 4 Dead calls them Infected rather than zombies which rehumanizes them a little, and the witch is the most human of all, the one who seems most aware of the tragedy of her situation.

The other special infected are designed to split the party. They lure or drag you away, they separate you with lakes of acid, they throw you around. The witch has a uniting effect, forcing everyone to huddle together on the far side of a room trying to pass without incident in total silence.

Left 4 Dead is a chatty game, one where the characters are jokey and everyone has to communicate when they need healing or are low on ammo. The fact the witch can make everyone shush and get serious, whispering into their mics when she's around as if she can hear them over the internet, is honestly a miracle.

If you think the tank is scarier just because it has more hit points I don't even know what to say to you, man.

It's Half-Life 2's 15th Birthday today! On November 16th, 2004 Valve released one of PC Gaming’s most celebrated games, the hotly-anticipated Half-Life 2 would go on to become the foundation of a generation of games and famous mods. The continued adventures of Gordon Freeman were a hallmark First-Person Shooter with a physics-based engine that encouraged you to play with the world around you. (It also launched the pale lighting and muddy tones aesthetic that defined that era of games.) Without Half-Life 2 and its Source Engine, we wouldn’t have a lot of landmark games: Team Fortress 2, Portal, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Insurgency, to name a few.

Half-Life 2 also heralded the launch of Steam’s new look and new role as a storefront for Valve’s games. No longer just a service for multiplayer and updates, Steam has since grown into the primary platform for PC Gamers around the world and an industry juggernaut. To many, the success of Steam has wholly eclipsed the Valve games that launched it.

Half-Life 2 has not dimmed in popularity, though. If you’re looking to get back into it, can I recommend the popular combat enhancement Half-Life 2: MMod? It’s quite good and just updated last month. There’s also long-thought-dead mod Logistique, which re-emerged this year after eight years in torpor and updated just yesterday.

Two quick notes: While it cannot consume alcohol at all, I would like to say that in theory Half-Life 2 can legally purchase and consume alcohol in the Central African Republic. That said, it should be ready to vote and smoke in time for the 2024 United States Federal Election.

On a personal note, I can still remember anxiously pre-ordering the collector’s edition of HL2 months before it released. The Source Engine tech demos and trailers were impressive, but at the time there really was no knowing whether the game would be everything it promised to be: Both cutting edge and easily modded, both innovative and traditional. It’s fascinating to look back now and see the game that inspired a generation of PC gamers and game developers turn 15.

🥳🎂🎈🎉!

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive container keys, which are purchased with real money and used to unlock the game's equivalent of loot boxes, can no longer be resold. In other words, the keys will not be able to leave the purchasing account, thus making it impossible to sell them on the Steam Community Market.

The reason? Valve has learned that they're being used to launder money. "In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers," the company wrote on the Counter-Strike website. 

"However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable."

The statement adds that while some (but clearly not many) legitimate users may be affected, "combating fraud is something we continue to prioritize across Steam and our products".

Valve also notes in its statement that "pre-existing CS:GO container keys are unaffected–those keys can still be sold on the Steam Community Market and traded."

It's a big deal to have Valve directly acknowledge that keys are being used for money laundering, and of course, it's not the first time CS:GO's reward systems have been used in shady ways. CS:GO skin gambling came under the spotlight in 2016 when two prominent YouTubers were found to be heavily promoting without disclosure their own skin lottery website. Valve gave chase, issuing more than 20 cease-and-desist orders against similar sites, but that didn't stop the Washington State Gambling Commission from getting involved.

In response to looming regulation in France, last month a CS:GO update introduced a new X-ray Scanner for that country, which basically allows users to check the content of containers before they're unlocked. 

A new AI built to combat toxicity in online gaming has banned 20,000 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players within its first six weeks, solely by analyzing messages in the game's text chat.

The AI is called Minerva, and it's built by a team at online gaming platform FACEIT—which organised 2018's CS:GO London Major—in collaboration with Google Cloud and Jigsaw, a Google tech incubator. Minerva started examining CS:GO chat messages in late August, and in the first month-and-a-half marked 7,000,000 messages as toxic, issued 90,000 warnings, and banned 20,000 players. 

The AI, trained through machine learning, first issued a warning for verbal abuse if it perceived a toxic message, while also flagging spam messages. Within a few seconds of a match finishing, Minerva sent notifications of either a warning or a ban to the offending player, and punishments grew harsher for repeat offenders.

The number of toxic messages reduced from by 20% between August and September while the AI was in use, and the number of unique players sending toxic messages dropped by 8%. 

The trial started after "months" of eliminating false positives, and it's only the first step in rolling out Minerva to online games. "In-game chat detection is only the first and most simplistic of the applications of Minerva and more of a case study that serves as a first step toward our vision for this AI," FACEIT said in a blog post. "We’re really excited about this foundation as it represents a strong base that will allow us to improve Minerva until we finally detect and address all kinds of abusive behaviors in real-time."

"In the coming weeks we will announce new systems that will support Minerva in her training."

Thanks, PCGamesN.

It's been longer than you think since Left 4 Dead 2 came out, and if you don't believe me, chew on this: Ten years have passed since Coach, Nick, Rochelle, and Ellis first blazed their way across the Infected wasteland. That's right, a full-on decade—you didn't see that coming, did you? I can barely believe it myself.

Sadly, despite all that time gone by there's still no sign out of Valve that Left 4 Dead 3 is something that will ever actually happen. But it seems like something is happening—in that other first-person zombie game, Dying Light.

Techland actually hinted at this a couple of days ago in a tweet following the end of the Dying Light: Deadeye's Promise event, saying, "We don't want you to be left 4 dead waiting for results!" That got some attention, but a lot of respondents seemed to think it was just a throwaway gag or pre-Halloween reference. Apparently not.

For now, Techland hasn't said anything more about it, and so it falls to us to speculate. It could be (and, I will commit further, probably is) something as simple as Left 4 Dead 2 character skins or cosmetics coming to Dying Light, which the studio continues to actively support despite the fact that it's nearly five years old. But Dying Light 2 is expected to arrive in spring 2020, and so with a little stretching and squinting it's possible to see hope for something more in-depth, especially with Left 4 Dead 2's big 10th anniversary coming in November. (Ten years! Where does the time go?)

I've reached out to Techland and Valve for more information. We'll let you know what happens.

I used to reinstall Team Fortress 2 every year for Halloween, dressing up in seasonal cosmetics to fight giant enemies like the Horseless Headless Horsemann, Monoculus, and Merasmus, or to just drive around in karts. Those events continue, and Scream Fortress 11 is live right now. As is the case in recent years it's more of a showcase for player-made creations, with two community maps and a host of community-created cosmetics.

Those maps are a king of the hill map called Laughter, and a payload map called Precipice. The cosmetics are bundled in a collection called Spooky Spoils which includes a bird head for the Engineer, a shark head for the Pyro, and a two-piece velociraptor costume for the Scout. The Soul Gargoyle from previous years returns as well.

Scream Fortress 11 continues through November 7, and you can find Halloween matches to join under the Special Events category of the Casual section.

It appears that there were some issues with the Dota 2 matchmaking rating changes that were rolled out in September. Valve said in its latest Dota 2 blog post that "some players, especially at the high end, have experienced a significant drop in matchmaking quality as a result of our recent iterations," and so it's made further changes to the system in the most recent game update.

The new update adds a rule for matchmaking for Immortal ranks intended to reduce some common "negative behaviors" and make solo queuing more viable, and also adds new restrictions on what solo and party matchups are allowed. Numerous bugs in the matchmaking system have been fixed, and there will be a greater emphasis on "having supports not be the highest MMR players in a game."

The update also makes some changes to the post-game evaluation screen, and adds a post-game survey that players will sometimes be asked to complete that "allow us to gather more player sentiments on match quality to help find common patterns to what makes matches enjoyable vs what makes them unenjoyable." Some methods of reporting players that weren't rated-limited have been removed "in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio," and Valve is also taking more steps to crack down on toxic players by disabling chat and voice functionality for anyone whose behavior score is below 3000.

The previous update included a wave of bans on players "at the very extreme edge" of toxic and negative behavior, but that only impacted a small percentage of the player base. "We also wanted a more gradual system to address players that are not at the furthest extreme but are still big outliers from the general player population," Valve explained.

"We believe this more gradual user-facing reinforcement mechanism will be valuable for both protecting the larger population from outliers and as a warning system for players who are moving in the wrong direction that might encourage them to improve. We set the threshold score at 3000 due to the low probability that anyone would be that low without having had a consistently negative impact on the experiences of many different teammates."

Valve warned that matchmaking could be "a little unstable" over the day or two following the rollout of this update, but invited players to continue submitting feedback on the changes once things had stabilized. "Our focus going into the next few weeks will be on monitoring and measuring the results of this update and following up as needed based on what we learn. The other big category we are going to be focusing on soon is revamping the new player experience for an update in the future," the blog post says.

"In addition, a lot of the ongoing work we are doing on smurf detection will indirectly help us in the future with placing new players into more ideal matches once they’ve completed their initial new player experience phase. We are hoping that after we get matchmaking into a better spot, it’ll be an ideal time for brand new players to join in as well as for existing players to invite their friends into the game with the help of a better new player ramp."