The latest CS2 update includes Ancient and Shoots nighttime modes, now available in Casual and Deathmatch in Ancient’s case, and in Shoot’s Arms Race mode. The update is part of a substantial rework to Ancient and Shoots, with assets now running on the latest shaders.
Night isn’t new to Counter-Strike, of course. Modders have been taking CS’s favourite maps and setting them to nighttime since the dawn of 1.6. One such map, de_dustyaztec, was a nighttime version of Aztec. The CSGO version of Aztec would later go on to be the asset basis for Ancient in CSGO.
Counter-Strike 2’s workshop currently has every possible map under the Sun (without the Sun) in nighttime versions, but Valve’s official version makes for an interesting contrast. Overall, Valve’s version has more ambient lighting, such as that of moonlight, that means the map never truly gets dark.
Lights, and candles provide contrast within the map, giving players advantaged or disadvantaged angles, but overall the lighting is more even than that of community maps of the same theme.
The update will be a significant boon for map makers, who benefit from the newly listed textures and features, which include blending options for wetness and moss, allowing map makers to give their projects a bit more detail and polish with the stroke of a mouse.
What Valve didn’t mention in their CS2 Patch Notes
While Valve were quick to point out the new assets for Ancient, the CS2 devs did not mention that the update made material differences to how the map plays.
The A now has a significant change to a common defensive position. A Main can no longer be held from safely inside temple. The position was hugely common for AWPers, on the map where AWPers were often left alone to defend A while the riflers focused on B and mid.
Now AWPers will have to take risk to get the reward of a kill from Temple, poking their head out from the collapsed wall to get a view of the enemy.
As usual, the changes to CS2’s maps are often subtle but can have a huge effect when played out over a huge sample size. Reviewing whether A is harder to hold, and is subsequently targeted more, will be an interesting thing to watch out over the next month or so.
BLAST Bounty will conclude on the old patch, therefore we will see the new Ancient first in Tier 1 at EWC, where Vitality will be huge esports betting sites favourites to claim their eighth trophy of the year in Riyadh.
BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025 stickers are also on sale, so if you want that golden King Mezii Champion sticker, now is your time.
Full CS2 patch notes are as follows:
Ancient and Shoots
- Added nighttime versions.
- Refreshed all ancient materials to use latest CS2 shaders.
- Added new blending options for ancient materials including wetness and moss.
- Added “ancient_zoo.vmap” with all assets and blending examples for mapmakers.
ITEMS
- Deluge Music Kit Box is now available for purchase in standard and StatTrak versions.
- New Limited Time Item, the M4A1-S | Solitude, is now available in The Armory.
ANIMATION
- Sawed-off shotgun deploy modified and fixed shell penetration on reload.
- Improved deploy +quick inspect animations for all knives.
- Improved deploy +quick inspect animations for the AK, Galil, AUG, PP-Bizon.
- Improved deploy animations for the AWP, M4A4, M4A1-S.
- Improved animations for legacy SSG08 models.
- Removed the deploy inspect delay for most weapons.
- Fixed XM1014 blocking crosshair during reload.
MISC
- Fixed a case where certain weapons could be fired sooner after a re-deploy.
- Rendering performance improvements across most maps.
- Rendering resolution and aspect ratio can now be changed in fullscreen windowed mode.
- fps_max can no longer be changed while connected to a server.
Darragh Harbinson is an esports writer specialising in Counter-Strike. He has written for Esports News UK, Esports Insider, UKCSGO, Dexerto, and Rush B Media.
