CS2 August 16th patch notes: Added Italy, Disabled matchmaking & More

We've been bamboozled by Gaben once more.

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Valve has pulled a fast one on us and added Italy to the CS2 limited test. Why is this a fast one, you ask? Well, we were all so sure that Inferno was next up to be tested that we got all excited for an imminent release, that’ll teach us. Valve unexpectedly adds Italy to CS2 while we still wait for the final competitive map.

What has changed on August 16th’s CS2 patch?

Well, it’s been almost 10 days since the last patch, so there’s been a few things that the team over at Valve has been working on. Here are the full patch notes available to us.

Release Notes for 8/15/2023

[ GAMEPLAY ]

• Competitive and Private Matchmaking are currently disabled in the Limited Test
• Minor adjustments to smoke cloud shape

[ MAPS ]

• Added Italy to Deathmatch and Casual game modes
• Removed Anubis and Ancient

[ ECONOMY ]

• Unified StatTrak position on both CS2 M4 models to not occlude stickers
• Adjusted sticker sizes on CS2 M4A4 so they no longer overlap

[ MISC ]

• Updated hostage models

[ SOUND ]

• Audio mix tweaks and adjustments

[ WORKSHOP TOOLS ]

• Added support for multiple team introduction variants

Valve adds Italy to the CS2 map pool, but it isn’t the map we were expecting

CS2 is most likely almost complete, as we are in the middle of August now, Valve only has around a month until the Summer Season ends. Because of this, we were sure, along with many others, that the next map was going to be Inferno. And then, by the natural course of events, CS2 would release and we’d all be very happy.

Inferno is the last map to be added that is part of the mainstream competitive map pool, because of this fact, we assumed that it would be the next map added to the CS2 limited test. But boy how wrong we were, Italy shows up out of nowhere to ruin everyone’s fun.

Not to say Italy is a bad map, but it doesn’t mark the completion of CS2 like we thought Inferno would.

Italy marks the second hostage map that has been added to the CS2 limited test, it’s probably wise to have more than one hostage map ready when the game releases for people who like to play that game mode.

Valve disables competitive and private matchmaking in CS2

As far as we know, this is the first time that Valve has disabled the matchmaking component in CS2 since it was released. But why?

One thing could be tied to the new smoke grenade cloud shape, it could be that the developers do not want the new smoke shapes to affect play and drop people’s rank, Valve is giving us some time to get used to it.

beyond that, we don’t know why matchmaking would be disabled. We’re not affiliated with Valve in any way, and can only speculate. That’s all we have for the CS2 August 16th patch notes.

We can’t wait to see what the next update to CS2 has in store for us.