Photo credit: Helena Kristiansson, ESL Faceit Group; IEM Katowice 2024 coverage powered by Predator Gaming
A dominant Faze Clan were victorious in front of a sold-out Spodek Arena crowd in the IEM Katowice 2024 quarter finals, routinely beating G2 Esports 2-0. Esports News UK’s Reece Barrett spoke to FaZe’s Håvard ‘rain’ Nygaard to get his thoughts on this and the latest CS2 changes.
Reece Barrett, Esports News UK: A fantastic performance in the quarter final, FaZe have already won Katowice once, how nice would it feel to add another one to the cabinet?
Håvard ‘rain’ Nygaard, FaZe Clan: It feels amazing to play [in front of this crowd]. I was down with covid in the hotel room [when FaZe won IEM Katowice 2022], so I didn’t even get to play. Being able to play in front of this crowd is a big, big difference.
Valve released a big update for CS2 three days ago which reintroduced the Arms Race mode to the game and came with the new Kilowatt Case and Nightmode music kit.
The community was most hopeful for the performance fixes that the update notes discussed, which heavily reduced “peeker’s advantage” which favours an offensive player who has more time to react because a defensive player’s client has not yet registered the attacking player’s position.
This has been an issue that has plagued CS2 since launching in the summer of 2023, and several smaller fixes has been deployed since it was announced that IEM Katowice 2024 play-offs would be played on the latest version of the game.
However, the update has not pleased ‘rain’, who still is not too satisfied with the state of the game.
A big new update for CS2 only released a few days ago, you haven’t had much time to play with it yet, how does it feel at the moment?
rain: It feels a bit more sluggish to me at the moment, I don’t know if it’s just because I’m not used to it yet. I don’t know if it’s my settings, but something just feels weird at the moment. They keep working on it, it’s going to get better, I know it’s going to be a really good game eventually.
Did something feel different when you first played it after the update?
rain: No, not really. CS2 has always felt sluggish to me, it’s not a big difference. I like C2, I like how it’s played, I just think there are still some performance issues, especially looking at smokes, shooting at smokes, it just feels really sluggish.
You had a great performance on Ancient in the last map of the series, it’s the map that you’ve played the most second only to Nuke in the last three months. Is this one of the maps you feel happiest on at the moment?
rain: It’s definitely up there. I think we all play very good on Ancient, especially because we have good entry players, and I think it’s a very comfortable map for us as a team.
Faze have now progressed to the IEM Katowice 2024 semi-finals, where they will face Mouz on Saturday February 10th from 3.15pm. The IEM Katowice 2024 grand final will take place on Sunday, and you can attend our London watch party here. Our supercomputer also predicted Faze will win IEM Katowice 2024.
Reece is a sports journalist who has previously worked with the likes of BBC Radio Solent, Southern Daily Echo, Salisbury Radio, VAVEL and many more. He is currently studying a degree in Sports Journalism at Solent University.
