We all want to develop a game that wins the hearts of players and motivates others to join its league. This requires tons of brainstorming, research, scrapping many ideas and approaches, and most importantly, learning strategies from the most successful games in your preferred game genres.
Many games have won our hearts, like Super Mario, Contra, GTA, etc. If we talk about all-time favorite battle royale games, then games like PUBG, Fortnite, Free Fire, and especially Counter-Strike made us stay connected with and witness their growth.
Among these, Counter-Strike is considered the game with a loyal fan base that has spanned 22 long years of journey and continues with many evolutions to come.
As per the Sept 2023 survey, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) had 1.55 million peak concurrent players on Steam. Surely, after the massive update release of Counter-Strike 2 that has replaced CS:GO, they will see an impressive rise in the number of concurrent players.
And, of course, there’s a reason behind the success of Counter-Strike that has inspired other game developers.
Hence, in this blog, we have covered everything you need to know from Counter-Strike that you can implement in your similar niche game.
The Timeline of Counter-Strike’s Evolution
After the success of Maze War – released in the year 1970, Counter-Strike became the next popular multiplayer first-person shooting game. It became a standalone game with subsequent versions such as Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), and the current version – Counter-Strike 2.
As there’s the question of popularity, the latest Steam data shows that Counter-Strike 2 has 666,405 concurrent players online and in-game, with 1,670,271 all-time peak players, a Steam player base score of around 88/100, and 7,783,860 total reviews on the Steam store.
- In March 2023, Van Corporation witnessed a record-breaking purchase of 39.5 million CS:GO cases in that month alone, which was quite an astounding figure in this game’s tenure (11 years).
- Before this achievement, the studio used to have an average monthly sales of around 20 million cases, which were considered to have doubled up after the news break about the counter-strike.
- Also, players are drawn to investing heavily in case unboxing due to the potential for significant returns, which includes a whopping $160,000 purchase for an AK-47 skin.
Moreover, the majority of the credit for Counter-Strike’s success goes to the game’s mesmerizing in-game cosmetics (like skins, avatars, etc.).
Things to Adopt From Counter-Strike In Your Action-Combat Game Project
Counter-strike is a tactical first-person shooter (FPS) game where players engage in team-based multiplayer combat. The gameplay involves two opposing teams, terrorists and counter-terrorists, each with distinct objectives and gameplay mechanics.
The objectives are VERY SIMPLE: terrorists have to plant bombs in different locations on the map, and the counter-terrorists either have to kill terrorists and defuse all bombs in order to survive in the game and meet the VICTORY.
Well, you’ll find this kind of game concept in any FPS game, but there must be something that counter-strike has done creatively, which made players stay loyal to this game.
Yes, there is, which you’ll find below with tips to adopt for your game design and development phases:
Game Environment & Map
When we talk about game environment modeling for shooting or adventure games, their details and realism play an essential role. Game environments are the ones that create a sense of immersion, transporting players into the virtual world. This way, it enhances the overall gaming experience, making it more compelling and enjoyable.
Game environments are the ones where the whole story of any game, meaning the game storytelling and gameplay take place, which asks for more focus.
When a player’s attention and engagement with the game are in question, counter-strike takes it very seriously. With each version, it focused on adding more and more realistic settings in the game environment.
- The first thing that counter-strike offers to its players is a broad selection of maps with different settings and challenges. Among other maps, the popular CS maps are Dust II, Mirage, Nuke, and Inferno.
- The environments they choose to design are mostly inspired by real-world locations, contributing to a sense of realism. From urban to industrial landscapes, they ensured to add diverse gameplay experiences.
- With the details, a counter-strike map does mark the locations where bombs are planted.
- With the environment realism setting, players often feel a stronger connection and sense of belonging, adding the most impactful point for their loyalty.
| 🔖 Learning from Counter-Strike’s game environment design would be to ensure interactions that can keep players engaged with the game world and make them come back often while balancing creativity and realism effects even in its fictional world. |
Intelligent Level Design
Regardless of any other positive factor, game level design tops all the game features that challenge players and stay connected to the game with utmost interactions. Designing levels for a first-person shooting (FPS) game is a critical aspect that directly influences the player’s experience.
When speaking of Counter-Strike, the creators have done a superb job in level designing of the game that players find intuitive and interesting to play.
In its level design, creators have brainstormed a lot to add difficulty levels and interaction points in its different maps. In this interaction, points include places to hide, set up bombs, potential areas to find opponents to kill, possibilities to find better weapons, and a lot more. Because of all these availability, Counter-Strike became the most loved game of players with a loyal community.
| 🔖 Learning from the level design of Counter-Strike would be to ensure to: – Create a natural flow within the level, guiding players seamlessly from one area to another. – Incorporate multi-level structures or elevated platforms that help players start game plans. – Balance the cover and open spaces for the game to become interesting, like when players come into combat situations or make the decision to hide. – Introduce chokepoints strategically to create tension and control the pace of the game while avoiding setting up frustrating gameplay. – Consistency is the key to offering immersion and creating a cohesive gaming experience. |
Do check out our creative Stylized Aztec Level Design work that can allure you and teleport you in its fictional world! 🛸
Game Visuals and Animation
For any PC and Console game, game visual effects or we say game animation are the key players elevating the gaming experience. Though maintaining simplicity and noting adding too much fancy stuff in the world, Counter-Strike still won the interest of game enthusiasts.
In terms of visuals and graphics, the latest version of the game known as Counter-Strike 2 is the talk of the town. This is especially with a comparison of CS:GO vs. CS2 in terms of graphics and animation. The subjects include graphics and animation for the smoke grenade spread, bomb blast and its after effects, and Molotov cocktail (a crude bomb) in the category of grenade and ammunition.
The next category is all about the way water and sewage animation interact with the player’s move in it. This animation astounded players and made them think twice whether it’s truly a water animation used in the game or if they have entered into another reality.
After this, the shadow effect that has been added to the game effect creates a WOW effect for the players to look at their shadow and enjoy their shadow movements.
Also, the weapon-dropping effect with sound is mindblowing when players want to drop their fully dropped or unnecessary weapons somewhere.
| 🔖 Learnings from Counter-Strike game visuals and animation would be to focus more on graphics and animation with gameplay designing to make the game visually more realistic and adding effects in a way that can help elevate the gaming experience, enabling players to get immersed in the game. |
Game Character/Avatar
For any game, especially in action and role-playing games, character design plays a crucial role. Speaking of counter-strike game characters/avatars, they have kept them quite simple yet elegant and motivating, that too, resemble military or law enforcement personnel.
- Counter-Strike characters are designed to be relatively realistic way enhancing the immersive element of the game.
- The character models in Counter-Strike have distinctive silhouettes, making them easily recognizable in fast-paced gameplay. It helps players quickly identify friends from foes, adding to the strategic element of the game.
- Counter-strike does not offer many game-player customization options but offers impressive character models and skins to customize as per players’ perspective.
| 🔖Learning from this Counter-Strike game strategy would be to… – Design and model characters distinctly and recognizably that contribute to better player awareness. – Achieving realism with simplicity can be possible with limited polygon counts and emphasizing the importance of efficient modeling and texturing. – Incorporating diverse and globally recognizable elements in character design can broaden the game’s appeal. |
Realistic Gun Mechanics
When creating shooting and player-to-player combat games, focusing on weapon design with realistic mechanics adds positive expression in your game.
Counter-Strike is renowned for its realistic and tactical gun mechanics, contributing to its success as a competitive first-person shooter. And it is because of the following impressive gun mechanics:
- When shooting from the gun, the recoiling effect is a crucial one to achieve in the game, mimicking as it’s being fired in the real world, and in counter-strike, gamers feel the same effect through its visual & sound effects.
- In counter-strike, the development team also ensured to keep the recoil reset time between shots for better shot accuracy than real-life guns and rifles.
- After recoiling, the muzzle flash effect comes as another crucial aspect in the gun mechanics. Muzzle flash is the effect that you see the fire spark coming out of your gun when the bullet has been from its nozzle. And counter-strike sets higher standards in the muzzle effects, giving players a realistic feel like they are firing rounds of bullets from their weapon.
- Counter-Strike is designed intelligently, like providing guns with limited ammunition, enabling players to make tactical decisions regarding using guns thoughtfully or picking up weapons with ammo left by enemies, fallen enemies, or teammates.
- Not just that, even the gun reloading animation used in the game resembles the real-life process of amazing players to play it more.
The sound effect used in Counter-Strike, especially for the gun firing, produces distinct sound cues, providing valuable information about enemy positions. Don’t worry, we will talk about this in detail in the later section.
| 🔖Learnings from this Counter-Strike gun mechanics would be to… – Balancing realism with the need for enjoyable gameplay is crucial. – Each weapon should offer a unique feel, ensuring players have meaningful choices based on their preferred playstyle. – Implement a recoil system that feels natural and learnable. – Ensuring that aiming feels responsive and complements the overall gunplay. – Create a realistic yet manageable reload system. – Plan the ammunition management in such a way that makes players conscious of their ammo reserves and scarcity to enhance gameplay. – At last, ensure that by adapting gun mechanics to fit the game’s overall design and intended player experience, you can create a compelling and engaging shooting game. |
| Additional Counter-Strike Gameplay Feature: Counter-Strike employs robust anti-cheat measures to maintain fair play. This commitment to a cheat-free environment enhances the competitive integrity of the game across different gaming devices. |
Players’ Learning/Practice Mode
Which was the last shooting game that bought you some time to explore the game arena, create your game plan, and practice before the game actually started?
Without a doubt, it’s Counter-Strike. The reason is quite obvious, allowing players to flourish their gameplay, try out new weapons using the in-game money that they have earned by playing and winning the combat, and a huge community of players sharing tips & tricks, and mechanisms for fellow players to master.
| 🔖Learning from this Counter-Strike enablement for players would be to… Give players a room and initial tips to successfully get onboarded to the game UI and its world to master it with each stepping up practice and game rounds. |
Sound effects
After the game’s visuals and mechanics, its sound effects become the next attractive feature that game creators should focus on. They play an essential role in addicting players towards the game. Here, the sound effect can be the main game theme music or official soundtrack, sound effects when players make any movement, or interact with any other entities present in the game.
May not be in the chart of game OST, but definitely in the areas of player movements and players’ interaction within the game entities, the CS team has composed and synced such in an impressive manner that makes Counter-Strike, especially its version 2 (Counter-Strike 2) an appealing game to play for its lovers.
| 🔖 Learning from this Sound strategy of Counter-Strike would be to focus on game OST creation and its sound effects that can help your game to level up and become the preference of players to play. This is the reason why games like Super Mario, Cyberpunk 2077, Shovel Knight, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and others have created a special space in our hearts and minds. |
Make the Most Utilization of the Gaming Device
This is the technical or we can say, the development perspective of the game development. Utilization of gaming devices – be it mobile games, PC devices (including monitor, mouse, and keyboard), or console, contributes to providing a better gaming experience for players.
Considering a better gaming experience at the core, the creators of Counter-Strike have designed it in such a way that makes the most utilization of the gaming device and offers precise and responsive controls.
- CS has been optimized for mouse and keyboard inputs. This helps in accurate aiming and quick reflexes, especially in a competitive environment.
- It also allows players to customize keybindings according to their preferences.
- Above this, CS provides detailed mouse sensitivity settings, allowing players to fine-tune their aiming sensitivity and customize it as their muscle memory adapts to its mechanics.
- Apart from device support customization, CS is known for its optimized performance on a wide range of gaming devices. The game graphics settings can be adjusted to accommodate varying hardware capabilities, which ensures a smooth game player experience even on lower-end systems.
| 🔖 Learning for this gaming utilization strategy of Counter-Strike would be to: – Whether it’s responsive controls, high-quality graphics, or precise input, optimization enhances the overall feel of the game. – In competitive gaming, where split-second decisions matter, having optimized gaming devices can provide a competitive edge. – Having customization options for every game tactic – be the settings for graphics, keybindings, or other controls, empowers players to create an environment that suits their playstyle and helps them master the game. – Developing a cross-platform game that is optimized for various devices and operating systems can help to reach a broad audience and better game revenue. – In short, a positive gaming experience facilitated by well-utilized devices contributes to player satisfaction and retention. Games that adapt to evolving technology trends are more likely to keep players engaged over the long term. |
What’s In The Downside of Counter-Strike and Learning Lessons From It?
Counter-Strike, among other first-person shooting games, is considered the pioneering game that has received a loyal community. Hence, it became our topic of discussion for this article to adopt its pros. With this, we should also consider the downvotes that Counter-Strike 2 has received.
The major update of Counter-Strike 2 was alluring from the graphics, sound, and every other aspect just because of its adaptation from CS:GO, which was a success. But its technical glitches, frustrating gameplay updates, and other content aspects have taken this game towards negative impressions.
Because of this, many players found Counter-Strike 2 as an incomplete game and required a lot of fixes to come back as one of the leading games in this category.
This asks for choosing the right game development partner who can help your game receive the robust technical support as well as content-side support that it needs to rank well and receive gamers’ positive feedback.
How 300Mind Comes to the Picture?
You definitely don’t want your game to face this technical as well as content and level design-based lag. Hence, choosing the right Game Development company becomes necessary.
Speaking of which, 300Mind can be your ideal choice as we have a passionate team of game artists and developers with strong game development expertise. We can offer you a top-notch gaming solution with the tactical analysis that your game needs to receive a positive impression.
So, are you planning to develop your first-person shooter game or a game of any other genre? From game conceptualization to design to development, we can help you with all of it! Contact us today with your requirements and book your free consultation with our game experts.
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