Counter Strike 2’s smoke grenades are what the shooter genre has been asking for for 20 years

They say happiness is in the little things. In the world of video games, all the changes that marked a before and after they were considered shades, at least in their day. They were secondary things that nobody noticed when the game they belonged to was announced. Because usually, what we all expect from a sequel is the classic “more and better.” See the original experience raised to the nth power. A graphic jump and a proposal that polishes any previous failure. But as we say, It is in the small details where greatness resides..

With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, people praised a thousand and two features, but most of us didn’t realize that what was really important was the inclusion of the RPG formula in its multiplayer mode. That was what ended up lasting and what made the shooter genre evolve. With Destiny, the last thing one would have highlighted was its menus, but here we are today, with even Assassin’s Creed and God of War copying that same interface to equip items and accessories. Same with the Dauntless who allowed us to prone as well as crouch, who dared to put a small map of the level in the lower corners of the screen, and the (often cursed) auto-regen inverter. Nobody bought a game for those changesbut then no one conceived a game without them.

And it is impossible not to think the same when seeing counter strike 2 smoke grenades. If someone knows about gestures, about details, that’s Valve, and where others would have shown 8 new maps, explosions at the height of Michael Bay or crazy changes like a story mode for Counter, they focus on what’s important, on the details. Instead of a cinematic trailer, the developer has presented the sequel with a handful of videos in which it reels off news such as the new smoke from its grenades, which interacts with the setting and conforms to it. It takes into account the places where elements of the environment are found and does not occupy or invade them, but surrounds them, “hugs” themand the bullets and grenades thrown through it they will clean your space in real time.

In Counter Strike: Global Offensive, for example, if you threw a smoke grenade, it would explode and spread around you regardless of the setting. Its radius of action and effect was always the same. In Counter Strike 2 it will be the opposite. If you throw that same grenade indoors, its smoke will billow across the room, not through the walls. That is to say that its smoke will go through the corridors, the stairs or the shape of the room in which we find ourselves.

In the past, if someone put a bomb on you and threw a smoke grenade on top of it, you had to take a chance and walk blindly into the smoke. Now you can take a couple shots, put a hole in that undaunted gaseous mantle and see what happens on the other side. But ephemerally, for just a couple of seconds. Then the smoke closes again like a curtain and once again limits our vision. Strategy and surprise factor enter a new dimension and it only remains to wait for the Counter Strike 2 beta to discover the ingenuity with which players take advantage of this feature.

Is it bullshit? Maybe. But they are this kind of bullshit those that later have real weight in the gameplay, those that are felt at the controls when playing, those that are remembered and add a new degree of immersion and fun to the experience. It will not be the only one in the game. Even more news about Counter Strike 2 has been presented and Valve has already answered the 5 questions that we all ask ourselves with the sequel, as if skins will be preserved.