Are Delayed Hitsounds the reason for Counter-Strike 2’s ‘off’ feel

28 Apr

Ganesh Jadhav

It’s been almost two years since Counter-Strike 2’s public release. While there have been improvements, the game still doesn’t compare to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s feel. The difference is especially glaring when it comes to spraying. Compared to its predecessor, spraying in CS2 just doesn’t feel right.

The r/GlobalOffensive subreddit also reciprocates with the sentiment. Some members of the community have even taken the next step, and so to investigate what really makes CS2 so different, they dove deep into the game. Their latest findings? A delay between the sound of shooting a gun and the feedback or hitsounds.

What is the Hitsound Delay?

The finding comes from two posts, first made by u/MadCharlesMLG, who discovered a delay between the shooting of a weapon and the hitsound. Furthermore, they also found that the delay does not exist for headshots or the AWP.

Another redditor, r/xKrasheR, dug deeper into the game files to investigate further and found a hardcoded delay into the game. It is only applied during the feedback received after shooting body armor, i.e. Kevlar.

A screenshot of one of the "soundevent" parameters for the "kevlar hit" sound that you hear when shooting someone (credits: Reddit post by u/xKrasheR)

What that means is that, if the shots hit the Kevlar while spraying, there is a 150 ms delay in the hitsound. This delay doesn’t exist for headshots, dinks or AWP shots. This leads to CS2's “off feeling”, especially for rifles as they have a high rate of fire.

The three primary rifles, AK-47, M4-A1s and M4A4 have 600 RPM (rounds per minute) or more, i.e. each individual bullet gets fired at an interval of 100 ms. But with a delay of 150 ms, you are essentially firing the second bullet before you get the feedback for the first, leading to a dissonance.

For a game where “spraying” is an all-too-important mechanic, adding a delay that is higher than the fire rate of weapons is a questionable choice, to say the least.

Oversight or Intention?

With Valve being the super-responsive company that it is, we would not know the definite reasons for the hardcoded delay, or whether they will or will not change it.

The best explanation for the delay is so that the audio cues sync up with the visual cues, making the game more realistic. But it just doesn’t explain why it only exists for body armor, and not all cases.

For what it's worth, the CS2 devs might have forgotten to remove the delay from feedback when they removed it everywhere else. But without an official explanation (which might never come) we can only speculate.

While overhauling netcode or reworking weapon mechanics is a complex, risky task, smoothing out basic audio-visual feedback would be a much simpler and safer improvement to the game.

It’s fine if Valve needs more time to make CS2 the best it can be. But improving smaller aspects like audio-visual feedback would definitely help ease the pain of losing CS:GO.

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Featured Image Credits: Valve