CSGO: The Best game I've ever played

        If you’ve ever talked to me for an extended period of time, you probably know that CSGO is probably one of, if not my favorite game of all time. For the last 8 or so years there has rarely been a week where I haven’t launched the game. Looking back a little bit I can happily say that through all of the times I’ve spent celebrating wins, raging at losses, and messing around with friends that there is no other game I would’ve rather spent all of that time playing.

There was a youtube video(linked down below) I watched a while back that I think really captures the idea of what makes CS a perfect game for me. CSGO steps beyond what it means to be a competitive video game. Every person who plays the game starts out with the same thing as every other player in the server. Grenades, guns, and movement are the same for everyone. This in turn creates an environment where even though a player may have a role at the start of the round, it’s versatile enough where each player can fill in any role at any time. I think it’s something truly special that we have a game where even if the enemy team can have the perfect read, create a situation which should be 100% theirs, you have the ability to shut it all down as long as you can out aim the enemy team. When you see those kinds of play on screen, you just know that it was a display of skill above anything else. This emphasis on using your aim makes csgo a honer’s game. One where you can play the game for 10,000 hours and still feel that there still is more to learn or practice. One of my favorite youtubers: Warowl says that CSGO is a game where your character doesn’t get better, you get better. I love that idea and that is probably what keeps me coming back from other games.

Something that seems to have become a requirement for FPS titles in recent years has been the use of hero characters. Look at valorant, Apex, Siege, Overwatch and even Xdefiant to name a few. Those games all rely on having the players pick a hero character with their own abilities and well defined roles to create some sort of team composition in the hopes that it will beat the enemy team’s. For lack of a better word, I think this is quite cringe. I think a big issue that comes from these games is “hero bloat”, the idea that you can only add so many new characters to a game before they become either way too complex/broken or uninteresting to your playerbase. It’s an inherent issue with bringing the MOBA like characters to a format where flashy abilities have never been the focus. One example I’m going to put here is Gekko from Valorant. He has an ability where he can summon a little buddy who can do things like plant or defuse the bomb for you, essentially adding a sixth player to your team. The buddy doesn't need to do much, just cause a little chaos to swing the tempo of an entire fight in your favor. Using him to reveal enemy players’ locations is enough to make the fight all about the ability and not the ability/intuition of the players involved. It gets more weird to think about in that a lot of those games tend to dumb down the shooting because it would be too much to juggle aim intensive mechanics and complex abilities. Some games have spray patterns, but mastering them becomes second place especially when compared to CSGO.

There are obviously a lot of nuances to be had about this conversation. One can argue the defined roles and abilities make these games lean on game knowledge which is just as important as mechanics in many situations. While I do accept that as a valid argument, FPS games on some base level have always been a place where the best players can show off their mechanical skill. Having characters with wacky abilities that can sometimes even give players “free” kills take away from that. Because the utility is so limited in CSGO, everyone can only have the same certain things at any time, it makes what we do with it so much more meaningful in my opinion. And all of those actions still need to be backed up by a deep understanding of movement and aim that just isn’t seen in other games. Just having one CSGO smoke in a clutch situation creates a million different possibilities while in other games you may be stuck with a set play pattern because of how the smoke has to be deployed/how it shows up to the other player. It also doesn’t help that updates and new heroes mean that the meta is constantly shifting and changing, meaning that all of your existing knowledge can easily become out of date. You may think that it makes CSGO more stale because there are very few actual updates to the game outside of map changes, but the base mechanics are so solid and complete feeling that 

Something unfortunate about this I’ve seen is that it makes CSGO so much harder to understand and master a lot of time. I appreciate those other games for making everything so defined because of how easy they make everything. Everyone knows what the healer character, or the CC character, or even what the lurk character can do. I just think it detracts from the skill needed to play the game. You have the same mindset going into the round, X character will probably play this location while Y character will try to take space in this way so it makes it very simple to play around. Because there are no defined roles in CS and all the utility is the same, it means you need to have a more in depth understanding of what is happening on the map. Seeing one player in one spot doesn’t mean the same thing every round. Are they there to fake or does them being there mean the rest of the team isn’t far behind? The answer is never the same, which can’t be said for similar games. In the end, you can’t really hide behind a character’s abilities to make a choice. All you really have is your own aim and game sense. 

Man, that was a big ramble huh. That was all just a big thought dump and I obviously come from a place of extreme bias in that I think CSGO is the best FPS game ever made. That is why I am most definitely linking the video which I think expresses a lot of the points made here in a much more understandable and organized fashion. Go check it out, it has definitely made me think a lot more deeply about why I’ve never quite seemed to put the game down after so many years. Now that I’ve spent the last hour writing about this game, time to go play it lmao. See y’all tomorrow!

Video: How I Learned to Enjoy Counter-Strike