GO wasn't an HD update though, it was a remake that completely castrated the game, designed from the ground up to appeal to CoD kiddies. Both 1.6 and Source are infinitely superior to that trash. They even managed to fuck up GunGame. If they'd included zescape as an official mode it would probably have been closer to a knockoff of L4D competitive multiplayer.
Wait, what? Why? Sure, gun game is different but it's not worse IMO. They removed quickswitch, of course, but they also removed shit like riot shields from 1.6 and so on. The only real changes I can think of that can't be justified are some of map changeS FUCKING NEWKE GODDAMNIT PIECE OF SHIT. Newferno is nice, though.
Didn't CSGo remove the silly "Knives make you faster" aspect?
No.
The only thing that CS:GO removed pretty much completly was ability to score consistent BHops which is an exploit in itself (though, absolutely glorious one when did properly) and resulted in a lot of cheats to enable sucky people do it, and is actually possible to reenable it in CS:GO on custom servers.
One of the big ones is the decrease in precision and range of movement, bhop not included. You cannot jump onto a wide range of environmental objects and pieces of terrain in GO which you could in CSS and 1.6. That means that there are fewer positions to take when defending a position, fewer routes to take when moving around the map. It pushes it much further into the dominance of twitch reflexes over careful positioning, map knowledge, and thoughtful movement. The movement values have also changed, and my impression, as well as that of a lot of other 1.6 and Source vets, is that it is less exact.
TTK in GO is higher. This means that it is more forgiving of mistakes and fuck-ups. You can miss a flash or be looking the wrong way when you come around a corner, get shot, and still spin around to cap the guy shooting at you. Again, advantaging reflexes over precision and planning.
The M4. Separating it out into suppressed and non-suppressed versions is idiotic and designed to appeal to shitty players who don't bother learning which is better for a situation or judging when they should put it on or take it off. Reduced complexity, in other words, again. Also a lot of weapons are just straight-up unusable in any remotely competitive context. Many more than in Source or 1.6.
HE grenades don't go through walls in GO. What the fuck. Actual walls, not places where there are map edges on both sides of a blank space, mind.
The Buy Menu is unintuitive shit in GO. But maybe that's just my muscle memory complaining.
Recoil was practically removed in GO. Every goddamn automatic weapon handles like the P90 in Source. Again, casul appeal. Shitters who can't bother to control their recoil and cry hacks whenever they run into someone who can positively loved GO. Head-height spray & pray with the AK works in GO. If you don't know why that's unusual, you don't know CS, bluntly speaking.
The skins and loot crates. FUCK. YOU. FUCK. OFF. I will gladly pay a bit more to not have all that bullshit inundate the game. Never mind all those Skinner box gambling sites that have been getting shut down for screwing dumb kids out of literally hundreds of dollars worth of skins.
Matchmaking-based multiplayer. Yes, I know that there are still servers. Also, splitting the MM even further into a bunch of queues. Nothing like waiting 10-15m for a goddamn match.
Trying to force it to become an esport. Nobody gives a shit about GO professional stuff the way they did for 1.6 because the game is too shallow for players to show any personality in their playstyle.
And yes, they managed to fuck up gungame. The mod ordered the weapons the way it did for a goddamn reason. You start with AWP and move down through progressively less powerful weapons because
that's how the mode is balanced. Granted, still not as bad as when CoD filed the serial numbers off and called it their own development while swapping that exactly so that you start with shit and end on sniper rifles.
Now, granted, they at least moved away from the giant hitboxes of Source. So count one improvement and a bunch of fuckups. The dumb shits who made GO (Hidden Path) are the same ones that ruined the balance in Source with some terrible patches from 2010-2011.
Why is it that every game that gets changed to be less hardcore always have the point of 'it being dumbed down for cod kiddies' like. Fuck. That's levelled against a bunch of games and honestly, I haven't seen anything in CS:GO to say 'hey cod gamers! look at us! we're cod! come play us!'
I mean. Seriously. Using more casual shooter players as a scapegoat is a bit of a dick move.
Because CoD is the ultimate casul game for casul gamers. It's the single most definable "favorite game" of screaming children and asshole fratboys everywhere. It dumbs down gameplay into an endless repetition of fifteen second snippets of action. CounterStrike is and always has been
the tactical small-unit FPS, just like Quake was always the fast-paced twitch shooter, so on and so forth. It's about planning, coordination, keen senses, prediction, and map knowledge. Your ears are more important than what gun you have in 1.6 and Source. GO stripped out most of the complexity in favor of making the game more runny-gunny, which is
exactly the formula that targets the CoD demographic of impatient children and angry man-children.