The finalists in a prestigious Counter Strike: Global Offensive mapping contest could help determine the next new level officially coming to the game.
Valve has taken several community-created maps from the Mapcore Exotic Places Mapping Contest before and added them into CSGO, like Abbey, Biome, and most recently, Studio in Operation Shattered Web.
YouTuber and CS:GO content creator TheWarOwl was one of the guest judges for the 2020 competition and filled fans in on his choice for the top four maps, along with their chance of making it into the game in a new video.
“Valve watches these contests, and even gives special prizes to the winners,” WarOwl revealed. “We are most likely helping to pick the next official CSGO map.”
To start things off, after the honorable mentions, in fourth place was de_jingshen, which has a peaceful Chinese hamlet as its backdrop, making for an ironic combination in a game like Counter Strike.
“The calming atmosphere of a simple rural life is the perfect backdrop to blood violence and death,” the YouTuber mused. “Seriously, it’s like mixing Animal Crossing and Doom.”
Jingshen itself is set up in a simple, four-square layout, but WarOwl thought it was “too simple,” with no way for teams to rotate other than backtracking through spawn.
Third place – and our personal favorite for its looks alone – was de_mutiny, a pirate cove-themed map by TanookiSuit3, Huvaligen, and JimWood.
Battling it out in CS:GO while surrounded by pirate ships and Caribbean ruins sounds amazing, but there were a few visual glitches that probably kept Mutiny in third, no matter how cool it looks.
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Gameplay-wise, it’s “slightly more interesting” according to WarOwl, with plenty of options for the Terrorists and for rotations out of the middle of the map.
Second place went to de_chlorine from Lizard and TheWhaleMan, and it may take the cake for most creative setting, taking place in an abandoned, Aztec theme park.
Another four square map, WarOwl admitted that Chlorine would probably never work at the competitive level, but pointed out it does have a lot of charm.
“Really interesting idea, fun, different angles and gameplay possibilities, but too dark and grimy to see anything,” he pointed out. “Certain skins are virtually invisible on this map, and the last one (Mutiny).”
Finally, in first place was Anubis by Roald, Jakuza, and jd40, which besides having the same name as an Overwatch map, also has the same Egyptian setting.
‘The whole point of the contest was to go to new and exciting locations, so we remade an OW map,” WarOwl joked. “It’s pretty obvious, this is the best-looking map.”
He added that in his opinion, none of the maps (Anubis included) were ready to be a competitive CSGO map yet, but didn’t completely count it out.
Other levels like Cobblestone and Overpass, faced similar issues when they were first released and WarOwl goes into much more detail about what each level needs to work, which definitely makes his video worth a watch.
