Most of us could lack the cybergoggles essential to jack into Half-Life: Alyx immediately, however we will carry a little bit of Alyx over into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Over the weekend, Valve added new Half-Life-y stickers to slap on weapons, patches to slap on uniforms, and badges to show in your profile. Some of them are cute! Unfortunately, they’re obtained via nasty little loot packing containers – and these aren’t low cost. And surprisingly, the brand new cosmetics don’t embody a brand new glove pores and skin of HL: Alyx’s gravity gloves, one thing many had anticipated.
As Valve notice in the announcement, people who purchased an Index package earlier than Alyx’s launch get an extra-rare model of the Alyx Pin and a Music Kit. Everyone else is paying for all the things.
For 85p, you may get a random sticker (sure, in fact there are rarity tiers). As with different stickers, you’ll be able to decide from a number of placement spots on a gun and scratch them up a bit. I opened my Steam Wallet and made my gaudy Five-Seven even weirder:
For £1.50 you may get a random patch to slap on the uniform of any Agent you personal. I didn’t purchase one in every of these as a result of the sticker was so far as I used to be keen to go to tell this submit.
Then for £8.65 you may get a random Collectible Pin to show in your profile. Chuffing £8.65! For a bit mark showing by your title on the leaderboards!
It’s wild that Valve can typically be to this point forward and othertimes to this point behind. They’ve had battle cross system in CS for ages however are nonetheless promoting loot packing containers for beauty doodads. Battle passes aren’t an ideal system, in fact, however they’re often much less cruddy than loot packing containers. Or an merchandise retailer the place you decide what you get, that’s another choice for serving to fund a free-to-play game. I suppose having the Steam Community Market feeding Valve a share of second-hand gross sales means they’re extra invested in synthetic shortage and randomised gadgets than different builders. It’s nonetheless typically outrageous.
And not having a brand new glove pores and skin like Alyx’s new gloves appears a weirdly missed alternative for a cool tie-in.
Players report that Sunday’s replace additionally mounted a crash exploit, in order that’s good. The patch notes point out improved efficiency for bot AI too.
