Along with a hefty update of around 1.5GB, Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive released its newest operation, Operation Shattered Web.

Valve’s Battle Pass

It is not a PVE campaign, even with its cool title, but rather a much-needed upgrade to Counter-Strike’s cosmetics system. It is comparable to the battle pass system of Dota 2. Even the accolades felt like the team features at the start of the match and the MVP voting after the matches of Dota 2.

Considering the financial success brought about by the battle pass system, Valve is now applying this concept to Counter-Strike which will provide substantial rewards for the price of $15. How substantial? I guess we will know soon, but it is promising so far.

Mission System for Stars

Much like the battle pass, the shattered web provides missions that you’ll need to finish in order to progress. Finishing a mission will provide you 1 to 3 stars (so far) depending on the difficulty of the mission.

Get enough stars, and you will be rewarded by stuff like Shattered Web Case (for 5 stars), various graffiti for 6 stars, etc. You can get up to 10 stars from the first-week missions. The first agent, which will be a modified default agent/s, can be collected after getting 28 stars, which will require you at least 3 weeks’ worth of missions if they will continue with the pattern of giving out 10 stars each week.

The master agents, which are supposed to be the coolest since they are the final reward/s, can be collected after 100 stars. And looking at the number of weeks right now, it seems that there will be 16 weeks’ worth of missions, along with their corresponding star rewards.

Gameplay Effects

Aside from the new maps that came with the update, Operation Shattered are supposed to be all about cosmetics and should not affect the gameplay. However, in my personal experience, the mission system that came along with it kinda provides incentives for people to act a certain way which definitely affects the gameplay of the team. For example, the mission Mark Your Territory which requires you to put 5 graffiti on the enemy spawn puts me in a casual game in which at least 3-5 players would always rush the enemy base. And since graffiti marking has a cooldown, you would see them camping it while waiting for the cooldown of their graffiti. I think it is normal considering that these missions are the only way to get stars right now. The implication of this is that people who solely play competitive matches would either ruin their game, trying to finish these missions or try out casual in which the missions would start to feel like a burden.

If you want to look at Valve’s Official Announcement regarding this without downloading the game, you could visit the page here.