CS2 Issues Update After Player Crashes The Game With 477 Bodies

"Counter-Strike 2" is promising a lot of changes to Valve's incredibly popular strategy FPS — much more than just graphical or gameplay updates. Of course, the formula and game modes inherent to "Counter-Strike" aren't going anywhere, but a lot is happening behind the scenes to make "Counter-Strike 2" the most realistic, most strategic entry yet. "Counter-Strike 2" will run via Source 2, the follow-up to Valve's iconic Source Engine that defined PC gaming in the 2000s, as well as its own proprietary physics engine Rubikon, which replaces the Havok engine used across its catalog of games. 

Though "Counter-Strike 2" hasn't been released yet — and won't be for a little while — there is a limited test available to a select set of "Counter-Strike" players. "CS:GO" YouTuber 3kliksphilip was one of those selected, and decided to push the limits of Valve's Rubikon engine. He did so by testing the game's ragdoll physics that allowed players to interact with fallen enemies, piling a number of bodies up as high as they could go. Perhaps in response to this endeavor and the computer-grinding pile of 477 corpses, Valve has now updated the limited test version of "CS2" to prevent something like this from happening again.

Ragdoll collision has now been disabled in the limited network test for "CS2." There's a suite of other updates that rolled out on March 30, 2023 — just a day after 3kliksphilip's video went up. But now, the tricks the YouTuber used to make the feat of more than 450 bodies stacked on each other aren't available. Whether these features will return for the final release of the game in Summer 2023 is a mystery. For now, it's still fun to watch how 3kliksphilip achieved this in the first place.

In 3kliksphilip's video, he starts with a brief demonstration, then goes over the ways the Havok engine and Valve's in-house Rubikon engine are different. He compares the Havok engine's handling of ragdoll collisions to the Rubikon's side-by-side, stating that "CS:GO" could handle around a dozen bodies before the physics engine started to bug out. 

He then cuts to a scene in the "Counter-Strike 2" version of the beloved "Counter-Strike" map Dust II, where dozens and dozens of bodies are all piled up, causing virtually no lag even when the pile is blown up. In the last minute or so of his video, the YouTuber begins the montage. After around 100 bodies in a single pile, the game just started to slow down. It wasn't until around 200 to 300 bodies that his computer truly began to chug. By the end, 3kliksphilip had around 474 to 477 bodies in his pile, located conveniently on Bomb Site A.

In "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive," things started bugging out when there were too many ragdoll collisions or other physics interactions happening at once. But in "Counter-Strike 2," the Rubikon engine allows way more objects to interact without burning players' graphics cards. Despite this vast improvement, it appears that "CS:GO" YouTuber 3kliksphilip's limit-pushing experiment may have caused Valve to re-think the systems — that didn't stop him from trying again, though. Whether it was because of his video or not, Valve appears to be willing to rework elements of "Counter-Strike 2" to make it as good as fans want it to be.