Counter-Strike 2‘s latest update adds the teased Animgraph 2.0, a feature update that greatly enhances movement animations.
Valve dropped the patch late on April 20th, with the update rolling out worldwide to a lot of reception online.
Animgraph update in CS2
The post teased a noticeable change to movement animations, making it clearer and more accurate where player models are in real time. That, and the movement better registers the direction a player is moving, making it clearer where an ally wants to rotate and for enemies to adjust their aiming patterns.
The look of it also affects the animations’ stances. CS2 typically had more closed-in stances, while Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and now Animgraph 2.0 show they are closer to each other, with body stances more spread out, making the hitboxes more targeted.
That update has since gone live with the latest CS2 update. And while that has some bugs, like burst-fire weapons firing rounds at the exact same time, those will certainly be patched. But the biggest winner of these movement changes seems to be AWPers.
It also nerfs peeking advantages as the player’s camera will no longer see more than the body gives out. The new, wider stance will expose your legs, so you’ll need to go back to CS:GO methods of peaking with flashbangs to get concrete information.
Again, all the more reason why more anchoring style awpers are rewarded for these changes. I can see A Long on Overpass being an example where this matters a lot. Or just players holding key sites and anchoring down in general.
Why AWPing needed this
Over the last few years, AWP players have not been doing too well. When CS2 launched, it came with a patch fairly early into its life that nerfed the AWP magazine down to 5 rounds per mag from 10. That’s a sizeable nerf that means they want to nerf AWP pressure and encourage players to not whiff their shots.
Then came the recent reload update for CS2: if you reload a magazine with rounds still inside, you lose those remaining rounds. This exacerbated an already struggling AWP, encouraging AWPers to once again stay locked into their mag, for better or for worse.
The two effects compounded, making AWP economics significantly harder to maintain.
So when an update comes along that makes it much easier to hit an enemy with an AWP now, that alleviates some issues. It rewards players who are very good at locking onto opponents and tagging them, especially with Animgraph’s wider stances.
It should make it much easier to hit key hitboxes of models and get much-needed one-hit kills.
The other thing is that if it’s easier to hit, it’s harder to whiff. That fixes some of the pressure due to the magazine and round reloading update change too. The general theory is that aggressive AWP players in the current pro scene should have a grand old time.
Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut, Nikola “NiKo” Kovač, David “Broky” Bročko, and other high-profile AWPers in the scene may indeed start shining much more than their rifling counterparts without dragging teammates like Danil “donk” Kryshkovets and Robin “ropz” Kool down, as there could be less reliance on fraggers to do their duty.
It’s an exciting time for CS2 players, as it does seem to reward better information gathering and aggressive aiming.