Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been on the market for over 8 years, and during that time it has accrued a truly impressive variety of custom maps, including a number of levels adapted from earlier iterations of the series. But modders are still contributing fresh arenas to the game, including an impressive recent rendering of one of The Witcher 3's most famous Locales.
CS:GO is a staple title in the competitive shooting scene, but like any long-running game, the game's standard levels eventually wear thin. Modders help keep the game fresh for casual play by injecting extra mechanics, weapons, models, and arenas into the popular tactical shooter. Homage maps that port settings from other titles into the game are especially popular.
One of the game's newest additions allows terrorist and counter-terrorist operatives to vacation at Kaer Morhen, the home base of Geralt of Rivia. The map is an impressively detailed recreation of The Witcher 3's fortress and the witcher training ground, which functions as a surprisingly good playground for firefights. While the map may not represent a radical gameplay shift, like CS:GO's Mad Max custom map, the blind corners, ramparts, and courtyards of the keep provide an interesting mix of cover and vantage points.
The map creator, ZelezoBeton, notes that the map is not a perfect, 1:1 replica, but a specific transformation made with CS:GO in mind. The map requires the Trouble in Terrorist Town plugin to run, which is an alternate game mode where terrorist forces have secret traitors seeded in their ranks. Despite this requirement, the map supports the standard, classic multiplayer modes as well as other custom modes. The map will likely never be featured in official competitive play, but it seems to stack up solidly against CS:GO's official roster of maps.
The Counter-Strike franchise features some of the most impressive shooting levels in video games, including the legendary Dust 2 map. Dust 2 has, itself, been ported to a number of other video games as a custom level, most recently making the jump to Fortnite.
Kaer Morhen is an important locale in CD Projekt Red's Witcher franchise, Andrzej Sapkowski's book series, and Netflix's television adaptation. Unsurprisingly, the keep a lot of deep lore behind it, and players will be able to spy a number of references to the events of the game series sprinkled throughout the map.
While many CS:GO players were frustrated to hear that Valve has seemingly halted work on the Source 2 engine, the long-standing tenure of the original Source engine has allowed modders to grow comfortable with the game's framework, and produce a staggering breadth of content. However, if the Source 2 is implemented into CS:GO after all, custom maps like Kaer Morhen will likely need to be redone after the upgrade.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is free-to-play now for PC.
Source: PCGamesN