Everybody knows that Counter-Strike’s asymmetric levels are its best. If only someone had told its millions of players. Counter-Strike creator Minh Le seems to agree with me at least, naming cs_siege as one of his favourites in a recent interview.
“CS_Siege, cs_facility, were some of my favourite maps,” Le told Spillhistorie.no when asked about favourites from the old days. “I also really wanted to love cs_747 but I think having linear maps was really bad for gameplay.”
Siege was one of the OG Counter-Strike maps, added in the first release, beta 1.0, back in 1999. It was the only one of the original four maps to make it all the way to the final release. Counter-terrorists start outside near a bridge over a ravine, while terrorists are entrenched in an underground facility with the hostages. Long sight-lines make it a sniper’s paradise; there are some brutal chokepoints that favour the terrorists; and in the original game, the hostages liked to get stuck in doorways a lot.
All of these elements just made it better. It was tense, and it had a sense of narrative to it. I like the Counter-Strike levels that pit attackers against defenders and makes one team an underdog, rather than sending two teams of sharks swimming along a de_dust log flume.
Not that I dislike Dust. Neither does Le, by the sounds of it. “I think de_dust took all of us by surprise,” he says. “We never thought it was that special when we first playtested it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see it become the standard Counter-Strike map. The mapper who made de_dust was extremely intelligent and spent a lot of time tweaking the design of de_dust to make it fun and balanced.”
Dust doesn’t need the love, however, and Siege absolutely does. It was never among the original mod’s most popular maps, and though the now 25-year-old map made an appearance in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, it has yet to reappear in Counter-Strike 2. Hopefully one day.
