Valve released an update for Counter-Strike 2 on Tuesday that adds a queued 3v3 mode, rebuilds how Premier matches settle on a map, and gives players a slower, silent reload. Valve published the notes through the game's Steam announcements, and HLTV reported the changes the same day.
The new mode is Rush, which Valve describes as a fast-paced 3v3 queue. Teams fight through a series of battle arenas to reach the opponent's castle and win the match, and a round is taken by controlling the tower after the enemy team is eliminated or time expires. The arenas are selected at random for each match, and Valve said results are tracked on a Rush friends leaderboard.
Premier's map selection now runs on picks instead of bans. Team 1 picks one map, Team 2 picks two, and Team 1 picks a fourth; one of those four is then selected at random and the match begins. Valve said the change is meant to give teams a chance to benefit from the time they spend learning a map.
Silent reloads and gameplay changes
Players can now reload silently by pressing and holding the reload key, at the cost of a considerably longer reload. Un-scoping a sniper weapon no longer produces a sound. Valve also increased the visual clarity and fidelity of bullet impact decals, made blood more visible, extended the ammo_grenade_limit_total setting so that it caps the total number of grenades a player can buy in a round, and made chickens take damage from the Zeus x27.
Crosshairs have been made resolution independent and moved into a new Crosshair/Scopes tab in the settings menu, which carries new crosshair styles; the default is now Dynamic Quad. Clan tags returned for members of Steam Community Groups and are set from the player profile, stickers can be applied to the C4, and a Starjunk 95 music kit went on sale in the store in standard and StatTrak versions.
Map changes
- Ancient: holes in the world fixed in Long A Main Hall, with door geometry and grenade clipping adjusted inside Jaguar
- Cache: gap fixes and clipping adjustments around the blue doors in Mid
- Mirage: scaffolding reinforced by the A-site balcony, closing the pixel gap that looked into Palace
- Train: a pixel gap blocked in the crates on bombsite A
Valve updated the engine code to the latest version of Source 2 and added Workshop entities for custom minimap images, location-specific skybox rendering, death-camera bounds and volume-limited camera shake, alongside new scripting entities and an AddTeamMoney API method. The halftime scoreboard now reflects the results of the previous round, and music volume can be set for each game mode.
