Part I: Introduction

“[Fun] was the degree to which the game recognizes and responded to the player’s choices and actions, right?... The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it, to me, it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me. [...] If you shoot at a wall, there have to be decals. If you kill a bunch of marines, the marines have to run away from you. Right? You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you've made. Otherwise it loses any sort of impact.”

Those are the words said by Gabe Newell during the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Documentary. The game the documentary is about, Half-Life, obviously needs no introduction. It introduced design ideas that carried over into many later first-person shooters and helped lay the foundation for games that followed, including Counter-Strike, which was born as a Half-Life mod at first. One key idea behind its design was that the game world should clearly react to the player’s actions, giving feedback that shows the player their actions matter.

However, this principle seems less present in Counter-Strike 2. Compared to previous versions of Counter-Strike, the game often provides unclear and inconsistent visual feedback to the player’s actions (as demonstrated in this post).

Part II: Body shot feedback

Check this CS2 clip followed by a CSGO clip:

https://reddit.com/link/1rmpswj/video/4iq7dj7yjhng1/player

As you can see, CS2 doesn't have very clear hit feedback. Sure, there’s more realistic directional blood that spills out the back and the sides in CS2, which is visible sometimes near walls and floors, but it’s barely visible from your POV. It is even worse at other map locations (see clip in this post for example). See the gross lack of hit feedback in the front.

But for CSGO, see how there’s a clear bright red hit mark for each bullet you hit the enemy, and the blood gushing out in the front where you can actually see it.

Now, let’s compare that to a modified version of CS2 where the blood impact particles were tweaked to make them punchier and more responsive (like adding a “hit glow” effect to enhance the visual feedback). This was done by the goat u/xKrasheR and here’s the workshop link with the addon if you want to try these yourself (I highly recommend doing that).

https://reddit.com/link/1rmpswj/video/ccakoaj8lhng1/player

While the mod exaggerates certain effects for demonstration purposes, I’m confident that if Valve decides to use any of its ideas, they will handle art-direction of the particle effects carefully and integrate them properly into the game.

(I have also compared and discussed bodyshot feedback between CSGO and CS2 in detail in this post and this post.)

Minor points:

(1) note that there are cases where if the bullet hits the pockets or some parts of the agent’s clothing, the bright hit glow doesn't show up (it seems it shows up behind those items), and I believe was also the case in CSGO. This should be addressed so that if you do damage anywhere in the body, hit glow shows up every time.

Clip here: https://imgur.com/a/0blDOmw

(2) It seems the brightness of the area impacts how bright/dark the blood appears in both CSGO and CS2. This could be adjusted a bit so that blood and hit glow are at least visible regardless of lighting conditions.

Part III: Headshot feedback

Even in cases where we do have the game responding to our actions, it’s not as impactful (pun intended) as it could be, and as it has been in previous iterations of Counter-Strike.

Check this CSGO clip that I clipped from a popular twitter post “CS:GO was so crisp…”. Ask yourself if you think it looks crispier and why:

clip is a little saturation but it's fine

It looks crispier than CS2 to me too, and since we’re just watching the clip (and not actually playing the game), it’s probably not related to netcode or tickrate. So whatever we feel here HAS to be purely visual, right? (Also, I’m not implying CS2’s netcode is perfect, but merely suggesting there has to be more than just that which is affecting our perception of the crispiness of CS2)

Now let’s compare that with current CS2 and Krasher’s CS2mod. Below I have tried to roughly recreate the same pistol ace clip in an offline server with both current CS2 and modified CS2:

https://reddit.com/link/1rmpswj/video/xes7o2z4xgng1/player

See how weak, light, and misty the blood effects are in CS2. And see how better it looks with the modified version of CS2 where it has CSGO-inspired blood particles instead of vanilla CS2.

Here's a comparison video across CS: GO, CS2, and CS2mod:

https://reddit.com/link/1rmpswj/video/t88lphdcxgng1/player

Here's how it looked like in CS 1.6 (source): https://imgur.com/a/s9RKLg4

Final thoughts: Maybe CSGO's thicker, heavier, brighter, and larger blood effects is what partially contributes to CSGO feeling crisp. I'm not asking to "bring CSGO('s effects) back" exactly as it was, but CS2 could learn a thing or two from CSGO and 1.6 and make it even better. Some of the things that could be better than CSGO: having the impacts being visible at all ranges (maybe by increasing impacts scale by distance). I’m sure Valve can make it better than ever.

Part III: General shooting related visual feedback:

Another aspect of CS2 that doesn't follow its own Lord Gaben’s philosophy: bullet impacts on walls and tracers are also visually very inconsistent. You see the white hit glow and tracers clearly in some places, but not that well in many others. Combine this with weak body shot feedback and lack of hit markers on the walls and invisible tracers, no wonder spraying feels shit in locations like top mid mirage. And this inconsistency is likely due to differences in lighting at various maps/locations. It would be great if Valve could address this as well. See the clip in my recent post:

Can't upload any more videos but here's a screenshot:

https://preview.redd.it/xklbspvnxgng1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=41b56281864da5c254a86ddfc0f9a9d28fbec52c

Part IV: Other visual aspects which could improve the game:

- Make the blood particles always render on top of the fog. Right now it doesn't and the blood looks like smoky grey. This happens in both current CS2 and modified CS2, but not in CSGO (I tested all 3 cases from the same location): https://imgur.com/a/ysgoNjw

- Increasing the viewmodel sway could potentially make the mouse movements more responsive/smooth and even contribute to overall so-called “movement” in a positive way.
- Reducing the ragdoll physics damping, making the secondary movements more dynamic and “satisfying” which would result in ragdolls being less “stiff”

TLDR: I need more blood in my pew-pew game, por favor.

(thanks for u/XkrasheR for also helping with drafting this post)