The Making Of Dust (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The Making Of Dust (2003)

johnsto.co.uk

186 pointskodisha33 comments

Good times. I miss the all classic maps that didn’t make the transition: cs_747, as_oilrig, cs_seige, even the weird es_ maps. Each one is tied to a series of emotional childhood memories that are no longer accessible due to no one playing them.

I hate how much less experimental and quirky multiplayer gaming is these days. Dust2 may be a “good” map, but it’s so freaking boring. Give me weird and unbalanced over tight and competitive any day.

(Seige returned briefly in Go for an event a few years back. That was really fun!)

Yeah in retrospect those missing maps were terribly unbalanced. They worked at the time because most people just played to have fun and get kills, and were less focused on the objective.

Now even in causal mode everyone is focused on the objective and some level of teamwork. Going solo and not playing the objective will result in much angry chat and usually a vote kick.

I do miss the more casual nature of CS (and many games) in those days though.

It was the fact that you where in a room together, at lan partys, a real social connection, that sort of relaxed the competition a little.

The shift to matchmaking from server browser changed this a lot. Having a server where you knew a bunch of regulars and could check in for a few rounds was a much different experience from being automatically grouped with random people who you'll probably never run into again.

Aaaaa I loved as_oilrig! Could never remember the name of it!

Also interesting, the same about de_dust2 - which is still my favorite map. Followed by Aztec.

https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2/

There are people to this day that will still grind on dust2 and office for days on end it seems. It's probably impossible to know but I am sure there are people who have played those maps 20 thousand times.

20k rounds at 2 minute rounds is under 1000 hours. I would expect anyone that played CS1.6 or CSS seriously to have that on de_dust2. Probably many have played 20k de_dust2 matches too.

Pretty sure I had well over 1k hours on de_dust2, de_nuke in practice/competition games alone (not public), and I considered myself a casual clan player.

EDIT: seems rounds were shorter than I remembered

Wayyy back in the day there used to be a flashbang bug on dust where you could throw a bang as a CT over the central corridor and it would flash any Ts running towards it.

When I needed to make food or just run away from the PC, I would get a P90 and rush the corridor. It was suicide but you could absolutely wreak havoc with the high rate of fire.

Counterstrike, and de_dust specifically, are perhaps single-handedly responsible for the rise of the "Internet Cafe culture" in many countries around the world.

My high school years were consumed by it. After getting off from school at 3:30 PM, we would head to an Internet Cafe and play Counterstrike until 6 or 7, or however long before our parents called the cafe's phone line one by one to ask the owners to tell us to come home for dinner!

We also played Quake 3 for a while, but it didn't hold our interest the way Counterstrike did.

Ah. The Internet cafe. Used to be part of my daily routine with friends as well. Except I grew up in china and my parents would beat me to shits when they found out that I went. Good times.

If you like this, you can find more at https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/

I consider CS 1.6 a bit of a phenomenon. I could never get myself into it. I love most competitive games, shooters included, but CS feels so bland to me. Everyone plays de_dust, as if there was no other maps. Everyone picks the same gun (m4a1 for CT, ak for terro, or the sniper rifle), as if there was no other guns. Also since the maps are fairly linear, the tactics for each round are basically the same. I could never understand why the game is so popular.

There were only a handful of useful weapons, the others were crap, and most the time if you had one of them you'd waste the round.

Same with the maps, the more complex maps would turn into a silly game of people being completely lost looking for the bombing sites, trying to find each other and not knowing were to go.

The same maps and weapons was the only way to have a direct match with full action.

Anyway there were some more maps that were usually played beyond dust and aztec, like dust2, italy, inferno, nuke, cbble, and also the fun ones like rats, or the ones that changed a bit the rules of the game, like pool, sniper maps, and so on.

But you could tell that you were playing cs too much, when you found yourself playing jumping maps...

I no longer enjoy first person shooters, but I was a teenager during that era and loved the game. The lack of variety that you found boring was what made the game fascinating to me at the time. Its simplicity and repetitive nature allowed one to achieve mastery through practice. Playing it, I felt the same feeling that I had after I had played ping pong regularly for several years.

Exactly this. The fact that a few maps and weapons dominated CS is what made it so unique, because you were forced to learn those few maps and weapons in extreme detail. When people couldn't distract themselves with fancy, shiny other things, they were forced to master those fewer things that were available (or were practical) and that many others had already mastered to a greater level than you. Your skill gap was was blatantly apparent to you and others, so you were very motivated to resolve your shortcomings.

I felt the same to a large extent. But still played it because moving on to the next game was what everyone else I'd played with did.

I think Medal of Honor: Allied Assault came out in a similar period and I ended up playing that for longer. I'd go back to playing dust on CS occasionally though - as a one map wonder it was good.

Occasionally today I'll turn an Xbox on and play some Battlefield, but I do miss FPS games of that era on a PC, with Teamspeak or whatever else we used.

Aah! Good old de_dust! Still remember fondly the times when CS was played with all my friends, we had a clan and gamed as much as we could. Had a nostalgia moment some time back, ut then i found out they had discontinued clanbase.org. That really sucked, since hundreds, if not thousands of matched were recorded there. Would love to get a hold of the original database so i could poke around and search for old matches.

If any of you played Firearms (one of the other popular HL mods at the time), this screenshot (apparently of an unreleased TF2) just has to remind you of Durandal:

https://www.johnsto.co.uk/i/design/making-dust/tf2_01.jpg

I completely forgot about it, that mod was AWESOME. Sort of a pre-cursor to COD in a way (more "military" focus vs "swat" focus of CS).

Firearms, Frontline Force, and may others.

I feel like Half-Life was in some way the perfect inflection point of PC mods where the experience was compelling but the art/content requirements weren't outside of the scale of hobby/indie teams.

Countless lan parties which were dominated by either de_dust or bgh.

From 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772521

When I think of CS:S (not surfing) I'd think of de_dust2 and cs_office. But, of the many many hours playing CS:S, my favourite map has to be surf_greatriver.

I've got well over 2k hours on that map alone (and later versions, such as surf_greatriver_xdream)

CS:S is one of my favourite games ever made - but I don't like GO that much. CS:S gave you more of what I liked (skins, maps, decent server browser, active surf community, good surf mods, ..)

CS:S was after my time. I played CS from beta4 until ... I don't know.

I liked italy and dust the most.

Hey if any of you are nostalgic for good old CS and have the money/space for a nice VR setup check out Pavlov. Its basically CS:VR. The first time you walk around dust/dust2 is pretty mind blowingly surreal.

I personally just spent the whole weekend with it. Not bad for $10 on steam!

We played the beta and first release of CS in college (UCD). Ah the memories of AWP and skywalking (jumping up on crates with aid of a buddy and walking on top of the map's bounding box "sky").

Man I still have my cs 1.5.5 bootleg CD with podbot (and a key that works?) so many good memories of playing after school. I always liked the AWP maps, and the twin towers, tree tops, and who can forget de_rats?

Hahahha de_rats. That’s a classic. So many good memories

(2003)

Added. Thanks!

Needs to be remade in: Rust

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