It’s hard to believe, but in the early days,
Counter-Strike only had hostage rescue mode.
Defuse wasn’t added until later, whereupon
it was quickly deemed the better of the two.
It’s not hard to see why. With hostage,
one team camps while the other team has to
do all the hard work. It’s not much fun
being the Counter-Terrorists when you know
the terrorist team is full of Office try-hards
who have perfected the art of camping out
the supplies room.
Defuse, on the other hand, has a more dynamic
balance to it. The Terrorists must attack,
but can choose one of two sites. So the CTs
have a choice: do they stack one to ensure
almost guaranteed victory, or do they have
a few people in both sites, hoping to weaken
and delay the terrorists enough to give the
rest of their team time to arrive?
And of course, once the bomb is planted it
becomes like hostage rescue again, with the
terrorists camping and the CTs having to attack.
But by that point the terrorists have kind
of earned it.
Hostage rescue also had some other problems.
You needed to save ALL of the hostages, so
sometimes it would lead to horrific situations
where one was saved and then the CTs brutally
executed the rest which would result in a
won round. And while those hostages were following
you, they had the tendency to… not follow
you.
Valve tried to fix this by changing hostage
rescue to only requiring one to be saved,
but rather than following the CTs, they had
to be picked up and carried to the rescue
zone.
But this didn’t help much.
So I propose a new hostage rescue style of
map. Meet de_fenestration. This is a small,
fast-paced map where the CTs must rescue the
hostages and return them to CT spawn. But
here’s the twist! Rather than starting at
the hostages, the terrorists instead start
at the OTHER end of the map. Oh and I added
windows everywhere.
This will result in a few key changes to how
the round plays out. The CTs, in theory, COULD
lock down their spawn. But I’ve made it
so that the terrorists have the high-ground,
so victory here is not very likely. No, the
CTs’ best bet -possibly for the first time
in Counter-Strike history- is to actually
go and rescue the hostages. So they run away
to where the hostages are, pick them up, and
then gain access to some new high ground which
happens to be higher than the terrorists’
high ground! At this point they should be
able to beat them in a firefight, or can plummet
to their deaths down into the hostage rescue
zone, winning their team the round.
It does KIND of support bots, but they often
forget to pick up a hostage, enjoy running
into this corner here, and will jump to their
deaths seemingly for no reason. But if you
enjoy this mode then I’ll work to improve
them.
This being a new gamemode, I’ve experimented
with 2 different kinds of windows. The first
of these is the sort that splinters into hundreds
of breakable bits. Running through these will
result in man-shaped holes and I think is
more fun in places like the starting zones
when the whole team’s piling through it.
The only problem is, it would sometimes block
my movement. My gut tells me this will annoy
people, but there is the tiniest sliver of
a chance that it will raise the skill ceiling
in some unforeseen way, so I’ll see what
you think after testing it.
The second kind of window completely breaks
straight away. I’ve made these break if
you run into them, truly living up to the
map’s name! I think that these are much
better, but each of these requires a bit more
work to be added in and maybe that’s why
I haven’t added more of these. You’ll
soon learn which windows are what sort.
I’ve been trying to imagine how the fights
in middle will go, using nothing but my BRAIN.
This isn’t easy and it’s likely it’s
horribly one-sided. I just don’t know for
which side, yet. But my hope right now is
that CT’s will get the hostages then will
head to this highest platform to engage in
a fight against the terrorists, waiting for
the perfect moment to plunge through these
plate-glass windows and into the hostage rescue
zone below. I don’t know how easy it will
be for terrorists to pluck them out of the
air, but smokes and flash bangs should work
in the CTs’ favour here. As you can see,
there’s a lot of skill involved with this
gamemode. I think it’s going to be a big
success.
So what are you waiting for?! Give it a go
on my servers and see what you think of this
new, fast-paced style of hostage rescue! De_fenestration
could be the start of a new era for CS:GO.
Waitasec… hostage mode… de_fene…
…Screw it, I’ll add a bombsite to the
hostage room.
