The story of CS:GO and why the game never dies

Modified Sep 05, 2020 19:02 GMT

CS:GO is the fourth installment of the Counter-Strike series and is widely considered to be the best iteration of the game till now. The game was released back in August 2012 and has seen innumerable highly skilled players ever since. Even today, it has one of the largest user-bases in the world, and is constantly streamed and watched.

Back in November 2019, popular YouTube channel theScore esports posted a video titled “The story of CS:GO: The Game that never dies”. In the video, we saw a detailed outline of the game’s never ending craze, and the many reasons behind it.

The story of CS:GO: The game that never dies!

The video began with a description of the first Counter Strike game which had a simple concept, no cheats, and an incessantly high skill ceiling that most gamers couldn’t keep up with. The game quickly became a global phenomena, and was played by gamers from across the world.

The video also talked about how the game’s developers found it hard to come up with a justifiable sequel. While games such as CS: Condition Zero and Source were well received by fans, there were certain issues that annoyed gamers.

At this point of time, the complaint that gamers had was that the skill ceiling that they were used to had been brought down considerably. These were all changes that Valve Corporation thought would made the game more accessible. However, it pushed gamers back to the original CS, simply because of the ‘overall feel’ of the game.

This led to a ‘civil war’ of sorts, as most original gamers simply chose to continue playing CS 1.6, while newer ones thought that the easier versions were better. This went on for eight long years, until CS:GO came into the picture!

However, CS:GO was not well received in the early days. The game was riddled with bugs, had severe lag issues, and felt like a completely detached entity of its own. Further, CS:GO did not have the same kind of speed and momentum that previous iterations did and had various features that slowed players down.

It was then that Valve announced the Dreamhack Winter 2013 Championship, the first eSports tournament the game’s developers had sponsored. The event completely transformed the CS:GO scene and made it everything players had been hoping for since years.

Over the next few years, the steady stream of major tournaments and increasing skill levels meant that by 2015, CS:GO has become the biggest eSports game in the world.

However, this does not mean that the game hasn’t had its downs, as well. There have been obscenely-overpowered weapons, and the biggest problem of all, cheating.

CS:GO has seen some of the biggest cheating scandals of all time. However, the community persevered, and came out of the scandals with an even higher skill level. The situation was such that the new influx of gamers had become so attuned to the CS:GO’s mechanics that older players could hardly keep up!

Towards the end of the video, we saw some of the most memorable CS:GO moments along with the sheer passion that fans and top players around the world feel for the game.

Of course, even today, while most of the gaming community is busy with the ‘Battle Royale’ genre, CS:GO rages on, and has one of the biggest, most authentic communities of all time.

You can watch the entire video below.

Edited by S Chowdhury