“Valve added a bunch of new community maps to Counter-Strike 2 on October 2nd,” SteamDB wrote in an October 4 BlueSky publish, “and now one of the maps, Transit, has been removed due to potential copyright issues and one of the entity names having a gamer word.” Attached was an image of a distinctively-shaped constructing in de_transit’s skybox.
I resent having sufficient of an web poisoned mind to parse that assertion, and needed to know extra. For any regular folks with wholesome relationships studying this, “gamer word” is a sarcastic flip of phrase that emerged out of the fracas of influencer PewDiePie’s use of a racial slur in a 2017 PUBG Twitch stream, infamously excused by one defender as a “heated gaming moment.”
Valve added four new maps to Counter-Strike 2 in an update published October 1: Transit, Golden, Palacio, and Rooftop. These had been neighborhood maps made official and put into Counter-Strike 2’s rotation by Valve. Two days in a while October 3, Valve put out a laconic update with simply three adjustments, one among which was “Removed Transit from official matchmaking.”
Absent clarification from Valve, we are able to solely speculate, however the most certainly perpetrator is the entity identify (how an in-game object is recognized in CS2’s scripting) of a singular object on de_transit. There’s an easter egg on the map with “have you seen me?” lacking posters that includes the cat from 2022 cat sim, Stray.
As defined by TheAliasILike on the Global Offensive subreddit, interacting with all 4 posters spawns a fifth, and interacting with the final one prompts a particular occasion the place a cat in a bucket ziplines throughout the map. It’s a really enjoyable, traditional kind of easter egg.
What’s much less enjoyable is the poster’s entity identify, which includes a racial slur. Counter-Strike map maker AlphaOwl shared a purported Discord message from the co-designer of Transit answerable for the offending entity.
“I want to say it was my fault,” the person, named Rikuda, wrote. “That entity was just a joke that I forgot to rename. I won’t make any excuses, I just want to apologize to everyone. That’s all.”
This is sort of assuredly why Valve eliminated the map, however some hypothesis has additionally centered on that constructing in Transit’s skybox highlighted in SteamDB’s preliminary publish. Labeled “FPI Bank” in-game, its distinctive form is a transparent reference to the “Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.” constructing from the kids’s TV present, Phineas and Ferb.
This strikes me as a far much less doubtless ache level for Valve, and is the kind of reference or easter egg we see on a regular basis in video games. The one factor that provides me pause is that Phineas and Ferb is owned by the litigious Disney company, which could object to its IP being in any respect related to a violent videogame the place you possibly can play as a terrorist bomber.
Regardless, it is a disgrace: An occasion of informal, callous racism within the aggressive gaming scene serving to make folks really feel unwelcome in the neighborhood. As AlphaOwl famous, Rikuda not solely blew up their very own mapmaking profession with a distasteful, puerile gesture, their collaborators on Transit have additionally been tarred by the affiliation, their working relationship with Valve doubtlessly ruined. The triumph of getting their design formally added to Counter-Strike is now a bitter loss.