You may know Mike Booth from the Westwood title Nox, which he described as his baby. I met up with Mike and some of his team members last week in VALVe's secret lair to get the Tiger Beat Scoop on Condition Zero!

Another CZ
After receiving Ritual Entertainment's Condition Zero content earlier this year, VALVe decided to re-do significant parts of the project. Community feedback wasn't too positive about Ritual's work. In my opinion, Ritual's quality of work for Condition Zero wasn't what the community expected from a title with VALVe's name on it.

Although you will still find some of the Ritual missions in the game, the meat of CS: Condition Zero is a new mode programmed by Turtle Rock Studios. Twelve Ritual missions will be in a section of the game called "Deleted Scenes." These missions were the best of the 20 or so that Ritual developed. But the new game mode that will comprise most of Condition Zero is a Tony Hawk Pro Skater-like challenge mode. Everyone besides you will be computer-controlled, so let's introduce the bots first.

Talking Computers
You know that Official Counter-Strike Bot tested in CS 1.6? "That was version one" of the bots, said Mike Booth. "I like to think of this as version one-point-five," Booth said of Condition Zero's enemy AI with a slight grin.

The testing helped considerably, Booth told me. His team took into account plenty of community feedback from places like the Steam forums. One example of feedback having an effect is the recently added ability for bots to knife fight in an intelligent manner. If that doesn't sell you on the game, I don't know what will!

All of your enemies and teammates are CPU bots. Each has a unique name and personality. The personality consists of four attributes: skill, co-op, bravery, and favorite weaponry. So if your teammate has a low co-op level, he might tell you to screw off when you give him an order. Yes, tell you.

Your teammates will use voice communication to tell you what's going on in the map and respond to your orders. With hundreds of sentence fragments, the bots can deliver numerous unique messages. The voice and pitch of each bot is unique, and will always match the bot's name and personality.

The voice comm. is not some tacky add-on, either. The feature really adds to the game. The bots use the same landmarks that your average community member would use to describe locations. When you're trying to defend an entire map, having your computer teammate scream "they're coming from the security doors" on Prodigy is quite useful.

Besides being very useful in playing the game, the voice comm. is also a major ego boost. If a teammate sees you shoot someone's dome off, he might just say something like, "Great shot, commander!"

The communication isn't only one way, either. You can use standard Counter-Strike radio commands to guide your bots.

Even enemy bots use teamplay. Enemies will rush sites together, do splits, and otherwise try to confuse your team. If you kill the bomb carrier, the Terrorists will try to pick it up and plant it. They're pretty damn smart.

Each time you beat a map, you get one "reputation point" to spend on a teammate. The level 1 and 2 bots—that cost 1 and 2 reputation points respectively—are opened by default, and naturally aren't too great. The best teammates cost five points each, and you have to unlock them by getting to higher tiers. As said earlier, each bot has four personality traits:

» Skill - Basic abilities such as aim, sound recognition, etc.

» Co-op - A higher co-op bot is more likely to follow your orders.

» Bravery - A bot with high bravery is less likely to retreat if it comes under heavy fire. Less brave bots will try to find cover when they feel threatened, but will still listen to orders if co-op is high.

» Favorite weaponry - The bot will always try to purchase this weapon. If he can't afford the weapon, then the bot will purchase an equivalent but cheaper item. The example I was given is that if a bot who loves the AWP can't afford one, he'll grab a Scout.

Naturally you'll be able to purchase better teammates as the game goes on, but you'll always be faced with Role Playing Game-like decisions of whether you want raw skill or better teamplay. You will need a good team (in either terms of skill, weapon choice, or teamplay) as the game progresses.

The highest level teammate is a level 5 bot. You may ask, "Does that beat my level 15 wizard?!" The answer is yes, you acne-ridden dolt. As you get to higher bot levels, bots start to like more useful weapons and naturally their other attributes rise to more appreciable levels.

The bots within CS:CZ are some the best AI ever seen in an FPS game. The bots do not seem sub-human and they certainly don't seem super-human either. They feel like humans. They only see what they see. They only hear what they can actually hear.

Of course, enemies will have the same set of attributes as your teammates, and the same amount of brains. Advancement comes down to your personal skill and ability to lead your team effectively.

image: http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/image.php?id=21659 caption: You and your alter egos can have multiple profiles for the single player levels.

image: http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/image.php?id=21662 caption: The tutor (in the upper right hand corner of the full screen) can be disabled.

Challenges
You and your bot Counter-Terrorist teammates will face Terrorist opponents, naturally. While your team's wins matter, you will personally have to overcome a variety of challenges to win a map. Each of the four difficulty settings has its own unique challenge. Gabe Newell (on ShackNews (http://www.shacknews.com)) gave an example of a standard challenge:

» in easy mode, you have to get one kill with a pistol

» in normal mode, you have to get one kill with a five seven

» in hard mode, you have to get three kills with a five seven without dying which may take multiple rounds

» in expert mode, you have to get three head shots with a deagle without dying

Once you beat the three maps in a tier, your team will advance to another map tier which ramps up the Terrorist player count and adds new, more difficult challenges. Each map, however, has its own unique set of challenges. No two maps will play the same. With eighteen maps to beat, six tiers and four difficulty settings, the game is by no means a lightweight.

But length doesn't matter, the ladies tell me. What is important is that the game is damn fun. And girth.

Some challenges are like little CS training events for newbies. For experienced vets, the challenges are fun novelties. Although some challenges involve guns like the AWP or M4A1, most that I saw involved less-used weaponry such as the Scout or P228. One challenge involved getting three kills with the SIG sniper rifle. I was personally enjoying the fact that I had to use these niche weapons in the game. I think they're more fun and challenging than having to use a gun I'm already strong with.

Other challenges are tests of your skill and tactical abilities. One I played frequently was winning a round in x amount of seconds, which basically means killing the entire Terrorist team pretty quickly. Another challenge I experienced was killing an enemy while he is blind. The challenges are varied, but always include some sort of killing. Hey, that's what Counter-Strike is all about!

As you and your team advance through the missions, your personal challenges become more rigorous. The challenges end up involving things like multiple headshots with specific guns or having to survive rounds (which may force you to play more stealthily). Most of the difficulty, however, comes from the enemy bots that will slowly put the hurt on. Eventually, you'll certainly grow to hate certain bots in the game that are particularly good.

image: http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/image.php?id=21663 caption: You can see the use of detail textures here.

image: http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/image.php?id=21660 caption: Here you can re-buy your past weaponry/equipment, or have the game auto-buy stuff for you.

Graphics and Gameplay Updates
Condition Zero features 18 maps that can be played in both the challenge and multiplayer modes. All of the maps are either updated classics or brand new. If you've been following the CS Xbox graphical updates you can expect the same kind of treatment for maps in CZ. CZ owners will be able to play the updated and new maps (i.e. de_dust2_cz) online with each other, complete with bots and everything else. It's unknown at this time whether the bots or maps will eventually be released for the rest of the community that doesn't buy the game.

Along with higher resolution textures for the updated and new maps, there are new detail textures which add a pseudo-bump mapping effect. In addition to texture updates, the maps have more brush details such as backgrounds and awnings. The game is no UT2003 in the graphics department, but every graphical update counts when we're dealing with a five year old engine.

The models in the game are the default Counter-Strike 1.6 models. No new weapons have been added to Condition Zero compared to Counter-Strike, but some map-specific items will be available in Rituals "Deleted Scenes" content.

A variety of gameplay enhancements have been made to the game that will be available in both multiplayer and single-player games. First of all, the buy menu has two new options: Re-buy and auto-buy.

With re-buy, the game will attempt to buy everything that you had during the last round. It's a pretty simple concept.

Auto-buy is a bit more interesting. In single-player mode, it will buy appropriate weaponry to beat the challenges (like an AWP if you have to snipe four people without dying). In multiplayer, the game will choose some of the more popular weaponry for you to use. For the hardcore out there, you can script auto-buy to your specifications. You can tell the game to buy an MP5 if you can't afford an M4A1, and so on.

Finally, two minor tweaks were discussed. First, you can no longer see player names through a smoke cloud or while you're blind. Second, when the bomb is planted a small flashing bomb indicator is added next to the round timer (for T's and CT's alike).

These gameplay enhancements will likely be added to 1.6 for all CS players to enjoy, but there's no word on the time-frame for that. Of course, the multiplayer that CZ players enjoy will always be the same as the public CS release (with the exception of the CZ maps).

Wrapping Up: November 18th
After years in development, Condition Zero has finally found its place. An odd collaboration between VALVe, Turtle Rock Studios, and Ritual Entertainment has finally succeeded in making what seems to be a fun title. I only play tested the game for a few hours, but I think that it's a winner.

If you asked me in June if I thought Condition Zero would be fun and I would have laughed in your face. Most people would have laughed in your face, actually. So many people, in fact, that VALVe decided to approach the game from a different angle. The hail mary worked, and on November 18th Counter-Strike: Condition Zero will finally be released over Steam and in retail stores. It doesn't look like it will disappoint.

related links

» Pre-order CS:CZ from Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005Y0IW/ref%3Dnosim/csnation-20)
» CS: Condition Zero information section (http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/view.php/czinfo/)
» Full CS:CZ history (http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/view.php/czinfo/about.csn)
» VALVe's Steam site (http://www.steampowered.com)