#Counter strike or league of legends full
#Counter strike or league of legends pro

The first time they met in person was at DreamHack Valencia a month later, after the organizers made a last-minute decision to move games to CS:GO due to a lack of signups for the 1.6 tournament. Up until this point a few of the known names only competed in ESL's weekly Go4CSGO cups online before the first small LAN called SteelSeries GO took place in Sweden, where Ninjas in Pyjamas manhandled the local competition, but the bigger teams had yet to meet in one location. The new game was released on August 21 after months of beta testing, and it took a while before tournaments would start cropping up consistently.

Compiled under an old, iconic brand was a combination of some of the best Swedish talent from both 1.6, in former SK duo Patrik '⁠f0rest⁠' Lindberg and Christopher '⁠GeT_RiGhT⁠' Alesund as well as Xizt from fnatic and Source, in ex-30P pairing Adam '⁠friberg⁠' Friberg and Robin '⁠Fifflaren⁠' Johansson.

#Counter strike or league of legends full

With the official CS:GO launch in the headlights, the first team featuring big names to announce their full commitment to the new game were Ninjas in Pyjamas.

#Counter strike or league of legends pro

Seeing as their game was experiencing an even more noticeable decline at the top level and that was often touted as closer to CS:GO in mechanics, being built on the same engine, Source pro players seemed to have an easier time taking the plunge. It was understandable then that some players were hesitant to make the switch when at least some events were still being planned in 1.6. Another long-standing TO, DreamHack, was still planning to host events in 1.6 in Valencia and Bucharest in the latter half of the year.

ESWC was the only big organizer from 1.6 that announced its support of the new game with a side LAN tournament at first, while ESL only hosted weekly online cups, and others weren't exactly lining up to fill the gap just yet. It was not apparent at that point that these resources would move to CS:GO, either. The tournaments then considered the 'big three' in Counter-Strike 1.6 and the equivalent to today's Majors - IEM, WCG, and ESWC - were all dropped in a span of a month. But by the middle of the year, some of the biggest organizers had pulled either some or all of their resources from the scene. Some tournaments were still being hosted in both games in the first half of 2012, with VeryGames around Kévin '⁠E圆TenZ⁠' Droolans continuing their dominance over in Source while fnatic, boasting a curious new mixture of Danish and Swedish players such as Finn '⁠karrigan⁠' Andersen and Richard '⁠Xizt⁠' Landström, were the top dogs in 1.6. An air of uncertainty loomed over the franchise's future, and one couldn't help but wonder whether Global Offensive would divide the scene even more. This was still a beta and the official launch was over half a year away, but the early signs did not instill much confidence in the community that this was the game everyone would get behind and that would attract a new audience. Sluggish movement, foggy maps, spray patterns that were all over the place, and sounds that were difficult to pinpoint were among the major concerns.

Sufficed to say, CS:GO was a mess when it was first brought to the screens. The community first heard of the new game in mid-2011 when the Seattle-based publisher first revealed that CS:GO was in the works, and towards the end of the year the new title was played in a showmatch during the IEM6 Global Challenge New York 1.6 tournament. Progress on perfecting Promod was slow, though, so it never got off the ground beyond attracting a hardcore base holding on to hopes that it was the future.Īn entirely new successor to the franchise was also on the horizon in Global Offensive, in development by a third-party company, Hidden Path Entertainment, but backed by Valve itself. Some efforts were being made in joining the two groups together, mainly in the form of a new version called CSPromod, a community-made project featuring elements of both games. Counter-Strike had a core fanbase very loyal to the franchise, but newer titles like League of Legends were all the rage at the time, so the younger audience had more modern and attractive alternatives to the outdated first-person shooter, causing the CS player base to stagnate. The Counter-Strike fanbase was very much splintered when the year 2012 began, one part following and playing the nearly decade-old version of the game at the time, CS 1.6, and the other the younger but still seven-year-old brother, CS:Source. We begin the countdown to the celebration of CS:GO's 10-year anniversary with a look back at 2012, marked by the exciting and scary arrival of a new successor to the Counter-Strike franchise.