All the biggest shooters have characters right now. Overwatch, Apex Legends, and Rainbow Six Siege are all built on the interaction of its different characters' abilities, informing the tactics and meta of the game. But even Fortnite has stack of character skins to help you differentiate you from other players. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with its randomly assigned generic terrorist and counter-terrorist skins is looking positively ancient in comparison. Well, that's all set to change - Counter-Strike is getting characters.
While some of the team at Valve has been hard at work on a new Half-Life (damn that feels good to be able to write after all these years), the Counter-Strike team has been developing something it calls agents. These new characters don't have special abilities or any traits that are going to change how Counter-Strike plays - which will be good news for any Counter-Strike players worried that Valve is about to radically change its unforgiving shooter. The new agents are purely cosmetic, though they aren't just nice to look at, some of them also have unique cheers, voice lines, and animations.
22 agents are being added to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as part of Operation Shattered Web (and only one of them is a woman, which is a silly oversight). You'll need to complete missions across your games of Counter-Strike to acquire the points to unlock them - these are things like getting ten kills with a particular weapon or performing certain actions in specific game modes, like recovering a virus sample in Danger Zone, Global Offensive's take on Battle Royale.
Shattered Web also adds cooperative Guardian Strike missions that see you and a friend fighting off swarms of terrorists.
As with Counter-Strike's other operations (though Shattered Web is the first new one in two years), this release adds new maps. These include a lunar base called Lunacy, a community-made Danger Zone map called Jungle.
There's a lot more information to pore over on Operation Shattered Web's site. But this is all really cool new stuff for a game that's closing in on being eight years old. Almost old enough to drink at a family BBQ with an irresponsible uncle.
Featured Image Credit: ValveTopics: Valve