The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team just published a blog update detailing how future sets of beta keys for the game will be sent out. Key recipients will be selected from a pool of people that've completed a survey. The survey is a simple template intended to judge your CS savviness, combined with an automated peek at your hardware. Copy this into a Windows Explorer address bar to open Steam and start the survey: steam://takesurvey/2/

Being absolutely honest about your skill, as I have above, is probably in your interest. "Over the coming months we will make selections from the survey participants. Sometimes we might add experienced players, other times new players. Sometimes 1.6 players, sometimes CSS players, sometimes people who have played neither."

"If you don’t fill it out, you won’t be getting a key," reads the post. Of course, Valve also states that active, current CS:GO players can expect to receive keys to gift to their friends through Steam.

The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta has sprung into action after a quiet couple of months. Last week the CS:GO website updated with the announcement of the addition of "more maps, more weapons, and most importantly more players." A massive patch added three new maps, Inferno, Train and Nuke and the weapon selection has been expanded with the addition of the Nova shotgun, Bizon and MP7 SMGs.

7,000 beta invites were also set out last week, with another 2000 planned for today. Valve say that they're sending out invites to active Counter-Strike community members, and are running contests on big CS sites like Gamebanana. "We will also have a survey up in the coming weeks that can help you get your name on the list for a key," they say.

The new Counter-Strike blog also mentions Valve's plans to balance the game based on feedback from top CS pros. Their main focus at the moment is on weapon recoil, which is essential to the feel of Counter-Strike's finely balanced guns.

"Recoil is tricky. It isn’t just math. It’s also about feel and one of the defining parts of Counter-Strike," say Valve in the latest blog post. "A few weeks back we had pro player Salvatore “Volcano” Garozzo by our offices and one of his biggest pieces of feedback he gave us was about recoil. It was still too hard to control."

Valve have adjusted weapon recoil twice in the last week, bringing it down and then asking players for their opinions each time. "During this Beta, community feedback is really important to us," they explain. "Counter-Strike has been around for 12 years and has been played by over 25 million players. We want to make sure to capture all of that experience and knowledge as we make Counter-Strike: Global Offensive the best version of Counter-Strike."

Even though Lego Lord of the Rings has been announced, we reckon they’re fast running out of franchises to render in acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Lego James Bond is the one we always mention when we see the Traveller’s Tales guys, but so far we’ve had no luck convincing them that squashing a plastic version of Sean Bean with a giant satellite array would be a very good thing.

Flickr user Catsy has completely inspired us to believe that a Lego version of Half-Life would be the way for Lego to go. As Kotaku reported, he/she has created a Lego version of Gordon Freeman using stock Lego bits and bobs, equipped with a customised Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle made from a Lego tommy gun.

As Catsy notes, Freeman needs a little more smoothing and painting. But between his/her and Orrange Stahl’s attempts at Lego Half-Life, we think there’s more than enough to convince the Danish toy giants to create Lego versions of Freeman, Alyx Vance, The G-Man et al. Who knows, maybe they could even make a game of it.

http://youtu.be/HrvFGga5Nik

Are you on it? Have you shot many men? Does it still feel like Counter-Strike? The starting gun has gone off, head-shotting a terrorist twenty metres away and signalling the launch of the Global Offensive closed beta. COUNTER-TERRORISTS WIN.

There's a video of the closed beta above, from Evil Avatar. It looks like Counter-Strike, it sounds like Counter-Strike, but does it taste like Counter-Strike? We won't know until we've jumped in and licked the sand on Dust. Valve have said that they'll gradually send out new beta invites until the closed beta is essentially an open beta, so don't worry if you're not in this round of testing.

Details are slowly emerging on Counter-Strike Global Offensive’s closed beta, which is due to start on 30 November. You'll need a key to join in, and it will initially consist of two maps: the ever-popular Dust, and, er, Dust2. “Can't wait to see people getting to play the changes in Dust,” said csgo_dev’s Twitter feed.

It’s very much a closed beta, though. To be in with a chance of playing you’ll need to have grabbed a key from PAX Prime or the Eurogamer Expo. There are likely to be beta key giveaways on certain popular gaming sites in the near future, too.

Don’t panic if you haven’t got a key. This initial closed beta is merely to nip any problems in the bud, and the testing period “will start small and grow until eventually everyone is in,” according to the Twitter feed. The Counter-Strike Global Offensive team are very open to feedback, too. “Everything. Everything is open to change in the beta,” they said.

This preview originally appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 233.

Since shortly after its first beta release back in 1999, this tactical, team-based Half-Life mod has dominated the competitive firstperson shooter scene, while countless hours of community yelling have made it a tight, balanced experience. A brief foray onto consoles in 2003 failed to expand the audience away from its PC home, so why are Valve attempting to create what they’re calling the ‘definitive’ version of a game that people like just fine as it is?

“We had been looking to create an XBLA version of Counter-Strike: Source as a sort of nostalgia thing,” explains Chet Faliszek, whose role on the game is loosely defined as ‘writer’. “But pretty quickly we began to realise how much we liked the game and it grew to something bigger.”



The team have decided to make some changes to the tried and tested formula. Classic maps such as Dust have been tweaked and, while other stalwarts such as Inferno and Nuke will return, they’re joined by new maps designed specifically for the Arsenal modes. The new modes are based on the popular Counter-Strike: Source mod Gun Game, in which players start with a pistol and earn a new weapon with each consecutive kill. Many of these new environments are said to be inspired by other titles in the Valve canon, though they’re holding back specifics.

The graphics have also undergone an overhaul, though they could hardly be described as beautiful so much as robustly functional. Eight new weapons have been added too. These pack tactical characteristics, as well as additional firepower. For example, the Molotov cocktail is intended as much for blocking off areas of the map as causing damage to enemies. Meanwhile, the Zeus is a oneuse, Taser-style weapon that costs an eyewatering $1,000 of your load-out bank.



Playing it though, it’s very much the Counter-Strike you’ll be familiar with, and Faliszek is keen to emphasise that the experience hasn’t been compromised through its shared appearance on consoles. “This is absolutely a PC experience,” he says. “One of the rules we had is that it’s going to be Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike. There is no auto-aim; it’s absolutely a game of skill. PC players will still be able to mod the game, host dedicated servers and all of the things that have made Counter-Strike such an enduring experience.”

Indeed, Valve looked carefully at what the community were doing in Counter- Strike and borrowed traits, including shorter round times and even entire match modes. Counter-Strike has always grown up in public, shaped by the rallying calls of the people who love it the most. While Valve are claiming CS:GO will be the definitive version, it’s still the community that will decide its future.

Preview by Simon Parkin.

The Global Offensive closed beta was to kick off with 10,000 participants this month, but CVG report that Valve have pushed it back a while after criticism from the pro players they have testing the game.

"They gave us a lot of feedback on things we should get in the game before we release it, otherwise we're going to be getting a lot of bug reports or a lot of feedback and it would just be redundant," said Valve's Chet Faliszeck.

"The closed beta will gradually expand to include more and more players, until "by the end of it, everyone will be playing the game. It will be the released game that you're playing and then at some point we'll say, 'OK we're going to officially release it.'"

"We have no mandate from anybody of when we have to ship this. So we're more than happy to just keep working on this until it's ready to ship."

That means we probably shouldn't expect the full release any time soon, but there are already pro competitions popping up. Check out one hour of professional battling from the Intel Extreme Masters.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gave a fascinating insight into the pricing experiments Valve have been running with Steam at the WTIA TechNW panel in Seattle recently, revealing that Team Fortress 2's shift to free to play quintupled its player base.

During the course of the seven minute aside, covered on Geekwire, Newell also revealed that the conversion rate of the number of free players who go on to buy something is "20 to 30 percent" for Team Fortress 2, much higher than the 2-3% conversion rate seen by other free-to-play games.

Newell said that he thinks the announcement of Team Fortress 2 as a "free-to-play" game, and not just outright "free" was part of TF2's successful shift of payment model, perhaps underestimating the power of the raw, uncontrollable human drive to acquire and hoard sweet new hats.

"Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have," Newell said, suggesting that the implication that a free-to-play Team Fortress 2 would exist as a continuing service was a key motivation for new players.

It's likely that Valve's reputation for providing free updates and ongoing support was even more of a factor than the "free-to-play" label, but Newell admits that Valve are generally stumped by their observations. As an example, Newell commented on the remarkable but confusing success that Valve saw early on with Steam sales, saying "we do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40.

"Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40, Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation."

"We don’t understand what’s going on," he added. "All we know is we’re going to keep running these experiments to try and understand better what it is that our customers are telling us."

Team Fortress 2 players are currently gearing up for the incoming Halloween Update, which among other things, is sure to add new hats.

Pro gamers and invited guests will make it onto the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive closed beta early in October. Valve's Chet Faliszeck told The Reticule that they're planning to grow the beta in the coming months, and he hopes everyone will have a chance to play by the end of the year.

Counter-Strike pros have already had a chance to go hands on with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive when they were invited to Valve HQ for testing earlier this year. A Counter-Strike: Global Offensive hands-on account from one of those testers uncovered new weapons like the molotov cocktail, and a tweaked and updated version of the Counter-Strike classic, de_dust.

The first Counter-Strike: Global Offensive trailer revealed more, including support for cross platform play with Mac and Playstation 3 gamers, and officially supported servers that will offer improved matchmaking and a ranking system.

Most recently, Valve announced that they have been working with the modders who created the original Gun Game mod, and will bring it to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with new modes and eight new maps.

Valve are incorporating the immensely popular Gun Game mod as official modes in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Arsenal: Arms Race and Arsenal: Demolition are the two new modes. They'll be playable across eight new maps created with help from the creators of the original mod.

Gun Game replaces Counter-Strike's cash-for-guns system with a kills-for-guns system. Everyone starts with a pistol and gets a new weapon for every kill. Those unfamiliar with Counter-Strike might recognise a very similar mode appearing in Call of Duty: Black Ops, but the original CS mod was the real deal, and it will get official backing when CS:GO is released early next year.

Valve have sent over nine new screenshots, showing some lovely jungle areas. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive doesn't seem to be pushing the Source engine especially hard, but it's a significant step up from Counter-Strike: Source.