Week 2 of the operation has begun! You’ll
still be able to do week 1 stuff but can earn
up to 6 more stars from doing some of the
6 new missions. None of these are required-
you can max out your earned stars from the
2 ‘3 star missions’, or can avoid them
by doing all of the others instead. It’s
sad there aren’t any new coop missions like
week 1’s Virus Outbreak. I guess like previous
operations, there will only be a few of these
spread out across the duration of the event.
A lot of you complained about performance
issues, which sadly(?) I didn’t have. But
if you did, see if it’s been solved with
this update, now that Valve has suspended
several UI videos while in-game, which I assume
were running in the background before, noticeably
slowing down less powerful systems.
Whereas before you could only deposit and
retrieve items from storage containers one
at a time, you can now do multiple at once,
speeding the process up significantly. You’ll
still have to watch it deposit each item individually,
but there’s something quite satisfying about
just sitting there while it does all of the
work for you.
With the HALO collection coming to Steam,
it’s bizarre but understandable to see a
new HALO sticker capsule for the game, all
of the designs for which you can see here.
One of these stands out as being far more
desirable than the others. MISTER CHIEF is
a character who appeared in the Bungie Weekly
Updates as far back as 2004, and has since
become something of a dank meme. I’m sure
he will become a must-have design for true
fans of the game to sport on all of their
weapons.
Also, if owners of the Master Chief Collection
‘accrue sufficient playtime in the game’,
they’ll get a HALO-themed music kit for
CS:GO. I don’t know how much play-time is
required to get this. Just go play your games
until you get a pleasant surprise!
And the community-made maps have been changed.
FMPone has rolled out his visibility and readability
patch for Cache to help make the new character
models to stand out better against the background.
Here are how a few of the spots around the
map have changed so you can see how he’s
gone about improving visibility. It’s generally
by making the walls have larger, lighter shaded
sections- you can see this most obviously
on truck, which will make snipers stood here
looking into A stand out far better. A tree
is missing in the distance at A which I think
is part of his on-going effort to optimise
this map’s framerates.
And Studio has had its first big update. Parts
of the map now have names which will help
people to learn callouts for it. Bombsite
B has been squished, making it smaller and
providing fewer camping spots. Bombsite A
has had some cover removed, and the bomb’s
radius has been upped from 500 to 600, since
you could easily survive the bomb plast, even
from inside the site. Unfortunately, I didn’t
see any changes when I tested it- so it could
be that the wingman config (which is still
set to 500) takes priority.
You used to be able to stand in this corner
but it’s been blocked up by a bush, which
also serves to obstruct visibility across
middle. Movement has been improved by removing
plant-pots or even an entire car near T-spawn.
And several community-reported bomb-stuck
spots and bugs have been fixed.
I don’t think that any of us were expecting
a big change this week. That all came last
week. And probably sometime in early December
while I’m away again. Have fun!
