Is CS:GO getting a Battle Royale Mode?

If you’re active within the CS:GO community, you have probably already heard of the rumours surrounding the next big update: a Battle Royale mode, or at least, something resembling that. Even if you haven’t, there is one thing you can’t deny: the rise in popularity of this new game genre in the last year. From King of the Kill to the monstrous rise of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (mostly known as PUBG) but never forgetting Fortnite, battle royale games are probably here to stay. PUBG is even breaking Steam’s player count all-time records – it surpassed by more than four times the peak number of Dota 2 and CS:GO players, and continues to do it every single day. In fact, at the time of writing this article, Pubg has more online players than Dota 2 and CS:GO combined and that is no easy feat to accomplish – remember that CS:GO costs around $15 and Dota 2 is free, while PUBG costs $30.

Regarding these CS:GO rumours, these are really well backed up by several updates that were deployed to the game, going as back as May 2016. Since that first update with hints on this new game mode, several more were released that featured even more of them.

Valve News Network, a Youtube channel that focus around Valve games and updates, has made a deep investigation on these updates and variables found within CS:GO’s game code and released a very informative video that shows all of them. I encourage you to watch it before reading the rest of the article.

As you can see, Valve is creating a strong indication that a Survival game mode is in the works. But could that work in a game like CS:GO? In my opinion, yes!

I’m a believer that variety in any game is always good, if everything is done right and not “half-done”. And as seen in the video, Valve seems to have been creating and preparing this new game mode for quite some time now. In fact, almost a year before the first version of PUBG was released on Steam Early Access. One could say that Valve had the vision to see that these would be the game genre of the future or at least for 2017-2018.

It’s uncertain if this will be an entire new title created using the CS:GO assets and Source engine or implemented within CS:GO. Still, we can speculate.

But can the actual mechanics of our favourite shooter work in Battle Royale game?

I like CS:GO's shooting mechanics. It is fun to master a weapon’s recoil and you get a good feeling on how much you are improving just by practising more and more, reaching a higher skill ceiling. But are these mechanics good for a Survival game? These rely on bigger maps, way bigger than the ones we are used to in CS:GO. In fact, most of Counter-Strike's gunfights can be considered close quarters, something that does not happen in a Battle Royale/Survival game. Which makes me wonder? Are the CS:GO we know ready for this kind of change? They would have to change how the weapons work at long range and change how the damage scales according to the distance. What about bullet drop? At the moment, CS:GO does not have that feature. Not that it needs, because it doesn’t. But if making a game of this genre, should it be added?

Those are all questions we can’t really answer now, only speculate and give our own opinions.

But then again, when we think of a CS:GO Battle Royale, it’s impossible to not make assumptions based on what we have already seen in other Battle Royale games. What if Valve is making their own version of it, with big differences in gameplay to the other titles, maybe to appeal to even more people. Let’s talk about my case: I like Battle Royale games, but I don’t spend countless hours on them as I do with CS:GO. In fact, I barely played any Battle Royale game in the last month and I don’t even own PUBG. But if something like that would come out in CS:GO, I have no doubt that I would spend hours upon hours playing it. Now imagine thousands of players in exactly my situation and to that number add the players that make the Battle Royale player count today also trying out this new mode: CS:GO could very well become the top game in Steam. Being the top game would attract even more people to it. Everyone would benefit from it: us players, because more players mean more diversity, fairer matchmaking and more socializing opportunities. And Valve would benefit with the economic aspect, which could even drive them allocate more resources and staff to CS:GO, making the updates more frequent and of higher quality.

Of course, I’m just speculating on what could happen – it could even be the exact opposite. Making two different genres into one game could split the community, like others had already done, essentially making them feel like stand-alone games and not a package with both options to offer. Valve also needs to remember that part of their CS:GO income comes from its eSports aspect and they should refrain from changing too much with that part of the game, if at all. It wouldn’t be wealthy for the game in any way.

All in all, we just have to trust Valve. Although making some questionable decisions from time to time regarding CS:GO, they are the ones that have the final decisions and considering everything, I personally think that they have been doing a really good job managing it throughout the years since its inception.

To finish up this article, let us not forget that these are just rumors, and all those console variables added throughout these last months can be just dead lines of code from experiments for another projects or even Source 2. It can also be for a completely new game, running on the Source engine, which would explain the tests inside CS:GO’s environment. We just have to wait and see.

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