Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Is Getting Close To Launching On Linux

[bibaheu]

I hope CS:GO works well with the Radeon driver... I don't want to boot Windows, but I don't want Catalyst either.

I guess my point is... the lack of copyright laws in Arab countries is awesome!

In Spain all cybercaf?s had Counter Strike, and all of them were the NoSteam pirate version...

[curaga]

It's like asking a 6-year child to watch a professional chess match. The child thinks players are just moving pieces and finds it pretty boring because it takes so long...
Unless you play in a ranked match, AKA competitively, you will fail to see the "strategy" because it is too complex for you to even understand what you're looking at.

If the chess players made the exact same moves for several matches in a row, changing nothing, well yeah, then that would be comparable. That's what a trained rat would do, below what a well programmed bot is able to do.

There can be no strategy in mindless repetition - it's rote learning what those players had done. You can well make the argument those players were just awful, like I would say of a chess player who repeated the same mindless moves every match.

[geearf]

I had a completely opposite experience when trying CS (the original 1.6). I found it exquisitely boring, with every pro player doing the exact same thing every time.

There was no strategy. It was like they had memorized the map from all sides and just pressed buttons with the exact timing they had learned. Each round they camped at the exact same spot, ran the same passage at the exact same time, and so on. The only thing that differed in their play was aiming at moving opponents obviously.

For the life of me I could not see the fun in that.

Since maps had more than one path, camping always at one spot, will get you killed fairly easily.
Now each path had some more secure spots, where camping was a better idea than the spot just next to it, so in a path, it does make sense to camp at the same spot over and over.

[RealNC]

Camping is an important part of CS. It's one of the reasons I like this game. You actually need to defend important positions; you can't just leave and run around the map, leaving critical spots undefended. The nice thing about this is that the somewhat asymmetrical nature of the game ensures that only the team who doesn't have the objective needs to camp, since one team needs to defend (and thus camping is important), the other team needs to attack (camping would lose them the round.) But sometimes, the defending team can actually perform a surprise attack instead of defending. Things are always interesting.

Also, you can't just play Rambo like in many other games, since you don't respawn after you die. A lot is at stake and you need to be very, very careful while you play, or your team is going to be a man down. If you die, that's it. Your team needs to play without you for the rest of the round.

The economy of the game is also a fun part.

Another important factor is that everyone has the same chance of winning right from the start. Ranking up in the game doesn't give you anything. In other games, you get better equipment as your character levels up. In CS, you get exactly the same weapons and equipment regardless of your rank. The only effect rank has is that it puts you against opponents of similar ranks.

A downside of the game is its toxic community. If you don't play with friends or generally with people you know, it can get very frustrating. It's similar to games like League of Legends or Dota 2 in this respect. When you play with strangers, the game sometimes seems like Rage Simulator 2014.

[Kano]

I played BF3 a while go and noshahr channels was my favorite map, with respawning it was fun. I think CS is more for pro gamers, but from Linux perspective it is a very important game. L4D1 is missing as well to complete the valve lineup but most likely somebody would play it only to get some achievements for the old maps. The maps are already included in L4D2. Lately I only played the game that crashes all the time, but still was fun to play... Witcher 2. What i would like to see in Linux are of couse some Mortal Kombat games. The arcade collection would need to use steam instead of game for Windows achievements but should be possible to port as it is mainly mame or a custom emulator in a nicer outfit with most likely very few 3d fx, maybe a few filters. MK KE however has already steam achievements, the 3d part may take a bit more time to convert.