Counter-Strike 2 has received its first big addition via The Armory Update, which adds a new battle pass to the game, alongside a slew of items and brand-new weapon charms. Well: new for Counter-Strike. Rainbow Six: Siege popularised these little animated tchotchkes, and they can now be found swinging around in everything from Call of Duty to Valorant. So what, you may ask, is the differentiating factor Valve has come up with for Counter-Strike?
Sausages. Don't ask why because Valve is quite above explaining such things but, for whatever reason, Counter-Strike 2's first major addition over CS:GO goes all-in on tiny sausage men. I'm just going to shake my head slightly and hand over to the CS2 team:
"Sure, you've got stickers and nametags and hundreds of weapon finishes, but do you have something that dangles? You do now! 'I bet I can only put it in one place,' you say. Well you're dead wrong! You can put them anywhere you want. (As long as where you want to put them is on your gun.)"
The first collection of themed charms are essentially little fat sausage people, with various Counter-Strike characters referenced.
"Have you ever looked at your weapon and thought, 'This sure is deadly, but I wish it had a tiny sausage person hanging off of it?' Don't answer that. Just keep scrolling, because as long as you dream about sausages, your dreams have come true."
I'm pretty sure my son dreams of sausages, so maybe I should can the snark and accept this as his route into Counter-Strike. But if you're truly anti-sausage then Valve has another option in the form of the Small Arm Charms, though there is a technicality.
"If tiny sausage men aren't your thing, can we interest you in 3% more gun on your gun? 'Is the gun made of sausage?' you ask. Technically, yes! Each Small Arm Charm is made out of 100% recycled CS:GO weapons. It's like a keepsake of guns past."
I'm not quite sure whether the "100% recycled" is a bit, or whether Valve is technically doing something with the guns from trade-up contracts, whereby you can exchange five guns for one of a higher quality. Either way, you'll be delighted to hear we're done with the sausages.
The charms are currently only available through the Armory, and can be dragged and dropped to various locations on a weapon. Each weapon can have one charm, but one thing I don't like is that you need to use a "Charm Detachment" to take it off: each Charm comes with three of these, but if you run out you need to buy more. This feels a totally unnecessary bit of nickel-and-diming, even if it's perhaps unsurprising.
The Armory Pass costs $16 (£12.79) and you can apparently have up to five of them active at once. Once activated it grants one of 40 total "Armory credits" which can be redeemed for various items, with XP earning the other credits as you play. I'm not sure how it will pan out over time, but after buying I played two Premier matches and earned a credit after each one: presumably that progression will slow towards the end, but as a fairly regular player it definitely feels like I'll get through it.
🏃 When Strafing / Moving Fast the new Animations Really Shine with Clarity Great Update Across the Board for Visually Understanding What Player Models are Doing!Lovely Stuff @CounterStrike pic.twitter.com/578BWhu01POctober 3, 2024
As for what you can get for your credits, there are four new weapon collections to start off with. One is themed around the Overpass map, and includes some truly gruesome weapon finishes, while the Graphic Collection is much nicer and themed around "techniques from traditional print media." The Sport and Field collection is what you'd expect, with the highlight a shotgun named "Yorkshire", while the last collection features 17 community designed skins.
There's also a unique finish that costs 25 credits: the Heat Treated Desert Eagle. And it really is unique: every single one will have a different wear and pattern to it. This is apparently time limited, so doubtless the speculators are stocking up as we speak. Speaking of which, neither the pass nor credits can be traded or sold, and you can't buy credits outside of earning them through the pass.
Atop these are two new sticker collections, and a QoL improvement that now lets you preview before scraping stickers to change their look (you can distress the CS2 stickers, if that's your bag).
The reception to the update… look, the people who care enough about Counter-Strike to post on the internet about it are a self-selecting bunch, so take this with a pinch of salt, but they're a little miffed.
The long-and-short of it is that, yes, this is technically CS2's first major update, but it's not actually adding much substantial beyond the gewgaws. "Charms… another way to milk the idiots," runs a fairly typical response, while elsewhere on the Counter-Strike subreddit folk are just posting memes about all the stuff Valve didn't do with this update (such as new maps, anti-cheat, etcetera).
I'm excited to play with the new shinies, but the community may have a point, just in terms of the optics if nothing else. CS2 has now been out for roughly a year and hasn't added a whole lot that CS:GO didn't already have. It's been crying out for a new operation, nevermind things like the long-awaited return of Cobble, and while sausage charms are admittedly quite funny, they ain't the red meat that players are desperate for.
But for now, sausages is what ya get. A selection of notable points from the full patch notes follows:
INVENTORY & ITEMS
- All items acquired from the in-game store (including the Armory), Trade Offers, and Steam Community Market are now subject to a 7 day re-trade and re-market restriction
- All stickers, patches, and charms available on Steam Community Market, in the Armory, or on friends' Steam Inventory web pages can now be previewed on your own inventory items
- Removed ability to delete weapon cases from your inventory
- Added sticker scrape level selector when applying new stickers to weapons
- Added a way to immediately remove existing stickers from inventory weapons in addition to sticker scraping
- Added nametag module preview on the actual items when applying nametags
- Fixed several cases where applying nametags or stickers would unequip the weapon from your loadout
- Customizing a base weapon that's currently equipped will now auto-equip the newly customized version
ANIMATION
- Improved character posing when on large slopes
- Made feet pin and unpin differently for all use cases to help remove aggressively leaned characters (AKA the MJ lean)
- Pin/unpin IK logic now not affected by poor server ping times
- Feet IK now repositions to idle pose if the feet have pinned at a largely different pose to that authored
- Re-authored run, walk, and crouch content to fix wide/scissor leg posing when traversing
- Changed ladder animations and behavior so characters heads are much more representative of where the player camera is, including characters now display crouch correctly when on ladders
- Removed popping when crouching or uncrouching while jumped and reduced leaning on jump animations
- Fixed character's pose popping when falling off a ledge
- Fix for many cases where character's posing would subtly pop when traversing with slow moving weapons
