CS:GO’s New Coop Game Mode

I know I said it’d be a while before I made a new CS:GO article, but I forgot to mention probably my favorite new addition from Operation Wildfire: co-op mode!

Yes, CS:GO is getting some sort of game mode revolving around fighting NPC enemies with your friends, and a lot of the coming maps haven’t been seen yet since people with the Wildfire coin have to get far enough along to unlock them. At 2:18 in the video the videographer clearly winds up in the apartments from Left 4 Dead 2‘s Dead Center while Payday the Heist menu music plays in the background, which is kinda blowing my mind.

I’m incredibly excited for this prospect since I’ve always preferred co-op games, and the new healing/armor mechanics sound like something straight out of that genre. I’m bummed I wasted my first few days doing the pointless slogs of the Wildfire campaign branch, from now on I’m doing Gemini so I can get to those coop maps at around the same time everyone else does.

But the options this new coop mode bring to the table is the most tantalizing part. Sure, this first mission is incredibly straightforward, involving literally nothing but killing dudes and progressing to the next section of the map, but every new game mode starts off slow. As Valve flexes its muscles at developing these co-op CS:GO missions, I’m positive they’re going to devise more creative and nuanced gameplay additions to the formula, just like Left 4 Dead 2 came up with plenty of ways to tweak the system and improve the gameplay from its predecessor. Weather could be a pretty interesting element to explore.

The heavy armor and medshots I mention in the video are pretty straightforward, but the wallhack grenades are the most original addition to the new co-op mode.  Letting you kinda see enemies around corners, I certainly couldn’t find a use for them but I’m positive that came about due to a lack of experience on my part. It’s also great from a mood-setting perspective; it feels like some sort of elite spy reconnaissance item that emphasizes the fact that you’re besieging enemy-controlled territory and will need every possible advantage to turn the tide of combat in your favor.

My only hope is that they eventually carry them over from the paywall of Operation Wildfire and into some sort of fashion where anyone can play them indefinitely. If they follow the trend of their older campaigns, then when Wildfire ends on June 17th these maps vanish into the ether, never to be played again except by people abusing the console, which heavily cuts down on available co-op partners. Could you even run a co-op mission from console, or would it lock itself due to listen servers missing the other player?

In general I don’t fully follow why CS:GO is so willing to just abandon content to the degree that it does. A bunch of these maps weren’t even reworked into Death Match mode or something that allows them to continue seeing use in the current game, and any time a map gets completely redone (like Nuke so recently was) the old map is gone forever. Feels like a waste of perfectly good content to me, and it would be a shame if CS:GO’s coop mode goes the same way.