Counter-Strike 2 is getting ready to add grenade skins

We foresee a big boom for Valve’s income

Counter-Strike 2, the highly anticipated successor to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive being playtested at the moment, got another big update.

Valve added a casual game mode for those looking for a more relaxed session in the tactical first-person shooter and switched some maps in and out for testing purposes: Mirage has been removed from all modes, while Nuke has come in for Deathmatch, Casual, and Competitive, and Office has been added available in Deathmatch and Casual.

Outside of some gameplay changes and engine updates, Counter-Strike 2 will contain new ways for Valve to make money as well – and this one should literally lead to booming profits: It seems very likely that grenade skins are coming to the game, as Valve has added the ability to inspect this equipment type during a game.

If you’ve ever seen some footage from CS:GO, you’ll have noticed that players can take a closer look at their guns and knives during a match, admiring the look of their lethal tools – you can now do that with grenades as well, so it seems like a logical next step to enable players to customize how their smokes, frag grenades, and other throwables look like.

With CS:GO skins being worth hundreds of dollars due to the game’s trading system and the prominent inspection feature and Valve profiting hugely from these sales, this is sure to be a lucrative investment.

We were extra active on Twitter this morning, which means there's a CS2 update. Today we're adding Casual, swapping out Mirage for Nuke and Office, making adjustments to audio, fixing the slow crouch bug, addressing bunny hopping and more! And you can now inspect grenades. pic.twitter.com/CMjRARG1rH

— CS2 (@CounterStrike) June 30, 2023

That’s not everything introduced in this update, though, so find the full Counter-Strike 2 patch notes for the latest version below.

Counter-Strike 2 patch notes (June 29, 2023, update)

Gameplay

• Added Casual game mode.

Shooting

• Fixed rare cases where bullets would not follow spray pattern.

Maps

• Added Nuke to Deathmatch, Casual, and Competitive game modes.
• Added Office to Deathmatch and Casual game modes.
• Removed Mirage.

Audio

• Added distance effects to all positional sound sources.
• Improvements to 3d sound processing.
• General mix tweaks and improvements.
• Fixed bug where sometimes sounds would not respect the occlusion values of surrounding geometry resulting in sources appearing closer than what they were.
• Fixed missing low frequencies at certain distances away from sound sources such as grenades and weapon fire.
• Fixed a bug where some sounds would be slightly louder or quieter depending on the listeners orientation.
• Added music cues to Match Accept and Loading screens.
• Added unique audio occlusion layer to help with vertical sound positioning in Nuke.

Animation

• Grenades can now be inspected..
• Improved healthshot animations.
• Improved inspect behavior for various weapons.

Movement

• Fixed cases of unintended slow crouch/uncrouch.
• Bunny hopping feel should now closely match CS:GO running at 128 tick.
• Added convar sv_jump_spam_penalty_time to allow fine tuning of bunny hop feel.
• The readout for cl_showpos has been enhanced to show the maximum speed of the last 3 seconds; this number is in parenthesis on the 'vel' line.
• Players can no longer jump at the end of warmup time.

Networking

• Sending game delta frames is now asynchronous, reducing dedicated server main thread CPU usage, thus reducing probability of dropped ticks.

Misc

• Fixed a case where a holstered weapon would be rendered on a dead player.
• Added a team-agnostic equip icon for inventory/loadout item tiles.
• When possible, switching to spectator mode will default to in-eye spectating.
• Adjusted the transition between spectator chase cam and roaming cam.
• Centered game mode text in the loading screen.
• Removed "Best out of X rounds" from the loading screen.

In a previous update, Valve got rid of CS:GO’s awful equipment buying wheel.