It's been 6 years! news - Classic Offensive mod for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Since I first released this mod 6 years ago with the purpose of testing modding on CS:GO, a lot has happened.

Shortly after release, the mod took off and we managed to grow a team of very talented people, got Steam Greenlit a few months later, then got the attention of Faceit, where they've hosted services for our mod, and reached second position on their platform.

Since then, we've decided to overhaul the mod entirely to bring it closer to CS:GO's standards and get rid of the placeholder assets. We've been hard working to remake classic weapons, animations, maps, sounds, and even bring back old gamemodes.

The project still needs a lot of content and mostly a lot of bug and security fixes related to CS:GO's monolithic nature, which prevents us from releasing the mod as intended.

We've restarted work on the mod near the end of 2018 with a better vision of what Classic Offensive should be. We've been doing monthly Devlogs on Twitter since then.

Our vision

We believe that matchmaking, skins and gambling have alienated part of the community, so we're focusing on core gameplay and features that defined what CS originally meant to the community.

We're putting community servers as a priority within our mod, we even gave them a dedicated tab in the side menu, instead of hiding it like CS:GO.

We have yet to contact Faceit after all these years to see if they're still up to implement tournament services for our mod, if so, we'll welcome them with open arms.

For lore nerds, we've set the mod around 1999-2004 in terms of aesthetics, meaning weapons, maps and characters are supposed look like their older counterparts.

We try to avoid looking at CS:S and CZ for references as they felt really detached with the newer looks. We're however not opposed to take some of the upgrades they did, we in fact went through with some of their changes, like Kevlar, flashbang and headshot sounds, Inferno's design and more.

Features from CS:GO are kept when they fit our goals, can't be removed or offers quality of life improvements. However, pointless weapon and agent skins oriented features are removed entirely or adapted to fit our needs.

Maps

We plan to release the mod with Dust2, Inferno, Train, Nuke, Mirage, Poolday, Aimmap, Iceworld. And add more from the community post-release.

We've decided not to rework any hostage maps for now as old hostages were cut from the game and will be complicated to reliably patch them back or remake them with scripting... they're maybe even a step back from what CS:GO has done, they need careful considerations.

Our maps are made with simplicity in mind. Simplicity in their layout, visuals, and how movement flows. They retain their CS layout and aesthetics, except for when edits are really necessary (Nuke's secret for instance).

Weapons

New weapons from Global Offensive have been removed or replaced for our mod. All the classics got re-balanced, re-animated, and re-modeled with our new standards.

It was important for us to retain their vibe, punch and uniqueness. With CS:GO, a lot has been lost with their designs and animations, guns feel generic and way too similar. We've decided to prioritize their identity, base their stats on their roles and the vibe they're supposed to give.

Gamemodes

All gamemodes and features from CS:GO will be present in Classic Offensive, except for Danger Zone, Retakes and Co-op modes, which will need fixing if we ever plan to use them.

Assassination has been reimplemented through VScripts. The gamemode still features having one of the CTs chosen at random to be the VIP. This player is automatically equipped with a USP, Knife and Taser, Kevlar+Helmet, limited ammo and 150hp. Like the original, the VIP will need to reach an extraction zone, and Ts will win the round if killed.

Improvements have been made to Deathmatch and GunGame modes to simplify them, with health now being refilled on kill, and GunGame being available as a FFA on tweaked standard maps.

Casual and Competitive are now being given new optional weapons, with the M72 LAW and Ballistic Shield respectively reserved to Ts and CTs, but also the Molotov returning for both teams. Those weapons can be disabled by hosts through commands.

When we passed Steam Greenlight back in 2017, we had a few email conversations with Valve and CS:GO devs, where we've got to explain issues we had with modding CS:GO and how we could remedy them.

Sadly it never really got anywhere. 2 years later we asked about getting a licence to access their source code, which didn't result in a positive answer.

We never got access to that license, meaning the mod got stuck in a release limbo, with all our hard work sitting there.

it's not currently possible to play online with all the security and hardcoded behaviors they've added. The only solutions are to patch the game ourselves through plugins / binary patching, wait for them to fix it (it's been 6 years), or release on an unsafe version that didn't had those issues (way too old and risky).

You've guessed it, we got tired of sending them emails and went with the patching route to continue our work, which is extremely complicated and requires us to be careful about how we go about it.

For legal reasons, we cannot use the source code that got leaked, meaning we'll have to patch the existing binaries released with CS:GO's latest security fixes.

We believe in what Valve is doing with security, and we just can't put players to a risk either, despite the latest updates that damaged modding, we're planning to update our version on each security fix CS:GO receives.

The current fixes we did involves the ability to connect to dedicated servers and lobbies from our appid properly, but also fix crashes related to modding in general, which CS:GO is full of and have been for years.

Those patches will allow modding to be more permissive and have more features, and we believe CS:GO modders might move to our "patched branch" if things get worse. Modding is already bad as it is right now, that most modders have simply gave up with the game. Opening our doors to modding might be a good idea in the long run, so we'll have to play with this idea.