Couldn't find a thread on this, so here it is. I think the game looks pretty interesting, however the beta for it has only really been available to professional CS players and so on. Until now. Apply here: steam://takesurvey/2/

For those who haven't heard of this game, it's not exactly a sequel to Counter-Strike: Source, it's more of a(nother) CS remake, or so I understand it.

Here's the store page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/1800/

Note: That steam://takesurvey/2/ link wont work in Chrome. Only IE and Firefox.

I opened that link with Google Chrome myself. :\

It comes up with a box saying that it needs to launch an external application (Steam). So I hit 'Launch Application' and the appropriate window on Steam (which is already running) opens up.

EDIT: You have to actually click the link. Copying and pasting (or manually typing) the Steam url in to Chrome's address bar won't work. It'll just do a Google search for it.

I see, I spent ages trying to fill out the DOTA 2 beta entry with copy+paste into my URL.

You can also just paste it in the Windows Explorer bar.

And not a single post was made on topic.

Out of curiousity, who actually LIKES the desaturated color look in lots of games and now apparently CS:GO? I'm not criticizing since it's purely a taste thing, but from my perspective I feel like the new graphics are actually worse than CS:S for some of the footage I've seen due to some of the art design choices.

Also I haven't played CS in a long time, but I am kind of disappointed the new one doesn't seem to sport any vehicles for maps the way beta CS did.

I don't. The modern color pallet consisting of brown and grey is getting kind of boring.

Check out Doom and Quake. This shit has been happening since the dawn of the FPS, it's why I love games like Tribes: ascend and Unreal. And the only reason I liked Bulletstorm.

Are doom and Quake not modern? Are they medieval?
What I mean is that many games set in the present day or a little bit in the future are mostly brown and grey. As opposed to games with a more fantasy setting who usually have a more color in them.

When you said modern games I assumed you meant the time period rather than the setting.

Fantasy tends to be forest green while Sci-fi tends to be blue. Most genres have a set boring colour pallet that looks totally uninteresting. But I do think dirty brown can work if done correctly, take Rage for example. The beautiful bright blue sky with wispy clouds looks incredible when contrasting with the brown rock and sand that the environment is made up of. Much like the Aurora in Skyrim provides a lot of beauty to the rather bland looking world.

It's just been way over done, especially in recent years because of the more "gritty" style of games the large amount of consumers want.

Yeah, I don't think that color pallet is necessarily bad. Bioshock is my fav of all time and that game is as brown as it gets(though to its credit, Arcadia's colors look all the more amazing because of it). It's just that we have to much of it. But that is like you said because of the setting and because everyone wants a gone-to-hell world to play in.

I'd say it's different for a couple reasons. Quake can and does have some color, it's more the choice of environment that keeps things brown and grey. In other words, you can have a gritty environment without mucking up the vision. Here's a screenshot as an example:



Looks like vibrant color to me, just not the most colorful environment. Same for Doom. Quake 2 I'll give you, that did some weird stuff with blowing out the gamma so the colors definitely got drowned out. Regardless, to me there's a big difference between having an environment that doesn't have a lot of color, and going out of your way to purposefully desaturate / tint the player's view, desaturate / tint all your texture images, and have most of your lighting use similar shades as everything you're already tinting. To me the new CS is a step backwards in this regard. I mean take a look:



Maybe you could let de_dust slide since parts of the middle east do look like they're completely blasted by sand. But the inside of a warehouse?



Compare that to CS 1.6:



That's why I was wondering if anyone actually prefers the new kind of lighting / desaturating / tinting. If not, I don't have an explanation as to why they're doing it.

I sure as hell don't. I mean the game isn't supposed to emulate super-serious terrorist/anti-terrorist scenario, so I don't think the grittiness is required.

I don't think grittiness even comes into it. For example, I think you could say Silent Hill 2 is a gritty game:



Yet it does that through textures and lighting, not by eliminating all color from a scene and smearing a tint all over it. If it was up to some art directors, this image wouldn't be "gritty" enough and would give the entire thing an extra grey tint and desaturate the textures more to really bring the grey out.

Fair enough. I think though that maybe the mindset behind the CS:GO changes are the more realistic/life like graphics = good graphics(as a heads up, when I say graphics I also mean art direction with that, the word "graphics" in gaming seems to mean different things to different people). Personally, I don't think that can be applied to CS:GO. As proven by user maps in CSS, people don't care whether they are fighting in a middle eastern city or a big blob of orange so I think the more saturated colors, especially on dust, worked pretty well.

Maybe that's how they're trying to differentiate the two games. Let's be honest, CS:GO is CSS with higher poly models, new textures and slight weapon rebalances. Anything else and the pros would get angry.

My real problem with CS:GO is the modding tools, the entire reason the original Counterstrike is still so alive is because of it's modding community, yet seeing as this is a multiplat release, one where PS3 and PC gamers will even be able to game against each other, what's going to happen to custom maps and custom servers? I haven't played a single match of CS:S on an unmodded server yet I fail to see how modding tools could be incorporated without splitting the community into fragments. Not to mention dedicated servers.

Well I think the community among platform will be split regardless, I doubt many people will make use of the PS3 PC crossplay anyway.

There's also the fact that integrating consoles and PCs in a competitive shooter is kind of flawed. It makes sense in cooperative games like Portal 2, but in a shooter, you have two sets of controls which differ greatly in terms of accuracy. No matter how good a console player was, a PC player of the same skill would still best them.

I'd imagine that's why there's KB&M support for the PS3 version. And I'm sure those with only a controller could play on their own servers.