Everyone knows that Counter-Strike’s asymmetric levels are the best. If only someone would tell millions of players that. Counter-Strike creator Minh Le seems to agree with me, citing cs_siege as one of his favorites in a recent interview.
“CS_Siege, cs_facility are some of my favorite maps,” Le said Spillhistorie.no when asked about favorite things from back in the day. “I 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 version, beta 1.0, back in 1999. It was the only one of the original four maps to make it into the final version. The counter-terrorists start outside, near a bridge over a ravine, while the terrorists are dug in in an underground facility with hostages. The long sightlines make it a sniper’s paradise; there are several brutal choke points that favor the terrorists; and in the original game, hostages liked to get stuck in doorways a lot.
All of these elements just made the game better. It was tense and had a sense of narrative to it. I like the Counter-Strike level where attackers are fighting defenders and one team is weaker, instead of sending two teams of sharks swimming down a de_dust log drain.
It’s not that I don’t like Dust. Le doesn’t either, judging by what I hear. “I think de_dust surprised all of us,” he says. “We never thought it was that unique when we first tested it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see it become a standard Counter-Strike map. The map creator who created de_dust was incredibly smart and put a lot of time into fine-tuning the design of de_dust to make it fun and balanced.”
Dust doesn’t need love though, and Siege definitely does. It was never among the original mod’s most popular maps, and while the 25-year-old map has appeared in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, it has yet to appear in Counter-Strike 2. Let’s hope so someday.
