14 DAY TRIAL // A brand new patch for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has just been released by Valve, bringing forth a major overhaul of the Cobblestone (aka Cobble) map by reworking its bomb sites and its main routes.
CS:GO launched initially back in 2011 but only in recent years did the multiplayer-only first-person shooter from Valve reach commercial and critical success. Nowadays, it's one of the most popular experiences on the studio's Steam digital distribution service and a very popular eSport, with hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to competitions for the game.
Cobblestone is getting a major overhaul
After confirming that ESL One Katowice is going to be the next major tournament with a prize pool provided by Valve, CS:GO has now received some even more interesting news, in the form of a fresh update that drastically overhauls the Cobblestone map, according to the official website.
A fan favorite in the Counter-Strike 1.5 and 1.6 eras, Cobble recently returned to CS:GO, after a rather lengthy period as a test map. Unfortunately, it never really got a chance to shine in the spotlight, despite the place in the default map rotation resulting in frequent matches on it.
As such, after making plenty of tweaks to the Overpass map, Valve is now overhauling Cobble through a big update.
First up, the two bombsites have been made smaller, and quite a few different elements are tweaked in many ways, with balconies getting removed, while new walls provide more cover for Counter-Terrorists that must defend the bombsites.
Many of the popular routes through Cobble have been modified by Valve, while the upper dropdown passage has been widened. The walls in the Terrorist tunnels have been removed, while the main Terrorist spawn area has been moved a bit forward.
All sorts of other optimizations have been included, while player visibility has been increased. Of course, like with many other updates, Valve has found time to fix a bug that caused a lower-than-intended number of chickens to be spawned.
A few other improvements are also included
Besides the Cobble rework, the new CS:GO patch also makes a few tweaks to some situations, while the positional sounds now spatialize to within 15 inches of the player and no longer "spread" to stereo when nearby. This means that, if an enemy is on your left, you'll only hear them in the left speaker/headphone, no matter how close you are to them, instead of going stereo and hearing them from both speakers/headphones.
Check out the full changelog for the latest CS:GO patch below.