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This week has been one to remember for many Counter-Strike players.
We saw the release of de_inferno and de_port for Counter Strike: Source, as well as new media demonstrating Valve’s HDR Lighting showed off at this year’s E3.
Although many of you might not have thought about it some people will have noticed that this is really showing off the capabilities of the PC as a viable gaming platform, but more importantly: It’s give us a nice glimpse into the future of the game we all know and love, Counter-Strike.

So you might be thinking, “What the heck is he talking about, it was just a little update and a few videos of HDR, big deal!”
Well, although many would consider this weeks events very minor, it has infact shown us the true changes Counter-Strike has been through even since I’ve been playing. One of the main ways of predicting the future is to look at how the past has progressed, and that’s one thing I’m going to look at now.

Inferno
The release of inferno for CS Source was certainly an interesting one. I believe like me, most people would have started up the game expecting to see that the visual changes wouldn’t have effected the game-play of the map we all knew and loved from the 1.x days.
Wrong.
The visual enhancements on the new source inferno did more than make us all go: “oooo, aaaa”, they changed the way we played the map. Darker corridors, more detailed furnishings, intricate camp spots… All began to turn the gameplay of inferno into a much more dynamic map.
Players now change strategy more often, they take advantages of the dark spots of the map, they use the furnishings of the buildings to their advantage.
What I’ve noticed most of all is that not only does the map ‘look real’, but that’s made the gameplay ‘feel real’.



You see, the old version of inferno usually saw terrorists sprinting as fast as they could to a bomb-spot and planting the bomb. But, now terrorists take their time when walking through the houses because it ‘feels’ more dangerous… They get more disconcerted when no strategy is decided at the beginning of the round… and overall, the terrorists you see in the game act very much more like real people due to their all-new ‘real feel’ environment.

So what does this mean for the future of CS?
In film one of the most important things about a shot is the way it ‘feels’, down to lighting, the framing, and the background sounds… The new version of inferno has turned into a real action-film style with more tension, feeling, and depth to it.
I believe that as hardware continues to develop, this will allow map-makers to really experiment with the feel of a map, something which was very limited by the original half-life engine.
This new ‘feeling’ factor added to maps could also be the thing that esports needs to gain a greater spectator following. Drama and tension could really start to come out of CS games with new maps, and these are two things spectators love. And if esports needs one thing right now, it’s a bigger spectator following.

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