Good news: Cache is back. Even better news: It’s not f-cking green.

But is its return actually a good thing?

Well, dear reader, if you’re asking me, my answer is yes. But also no.

It sounds complicated, but really, it’s not. I just think Counter-Strike has a bit of a map pool problem. A problem not necessarily caused by Cache, either (thanks, Anubis), but one that is exacerbated by it, and one that can be solved by learning from VALORANT.

CS fails where VALORANT succeeds

Despite having Fracture as one of its maps - which, if you’ve never played it, is at least three times worse than Vertigo - VALORANT does a lot right with its map pool.

The biggest positive with the VALORANT map pool is that Riot have 12 maps to pick from. Those maps are whittled down to seven active duty maps per season, leaving the map pool constantly feeling fresh and never the prisoner of one map in particular.

[cough] Inferno.

Of course, Valve have addressed this issue in CS2 now that we have a map pool change after each Major, but with them seemingly giving up on Vertigo, and both Anubis and CS2 Train not really capturing the hearts of either the casual or professional player base, our map pool still feels awfully stagnant.

The other thing VALORANT maps have going for them is that they all actually serve a place within the map pool, even if that’s because of their gimmicks.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m advocating for maps with ziplines, teleporters, or three bombsites (although I have always been intrigued to see how the latter would play out in CS), but it would be nice to look at the CS map pool and be able to say more than “this is a pug map” or “this is a strategic map”.

VALORANT’s large map pool also allows them to change it as frequently as they do, without feeling like they’re ever going backwards, which I’d argue cutting Train for Anubis was this year. That’s not to say all the maps are good, Fracture is absolutely horrible, but the frequent changes to the map pool also come with frequent changes to the maps themselves, shaking up the meta each time.

Lack of availability

So, with that said, does Counter-Strike even have enough maps to solve its map pool problem?

Well, if we add Cache, Vertigo, and Train into the current map pool, we end up with ten - which is actually a reasonable amount to choose from. The only issue being that Vertigo is intolerable, and Anubis is quickly on its way to becoming yet another failed experiment.

So… we have eight. Yeah, that’s not great.

The problem is that outside of those ten maps, there aren’t even any other maps to choose from. Cobblestone is a terrible map protected only by nostalgia, and Tuscan, when it was added to CS:GO, was also not great.

Add in the fact that there’s also a decent reason to believe that Cache may arrive in the map pool in the same stale state it left it in, and we’re potentially back down to seven maps.

You could make the argument that new maps are always created, but let’s be real here: When are any of these maps actually any good? In fact, new maps being terrible is a problem that has been plaguing many games for a while. Battlefield, Call of Duty, and even VALORANT, a game with maps I generally like, have a clear disparity between the maps available at launch and the ones that came later; each of these games have been producing worse and worse maps for years now, leading me to ask where all the good map makers went.

The fact is, unless we’re willing to accept that we will occasionally have to play with bad maps in a bad map pool, we’re likely never going to see good new maps added to the pool.

The map pool spectrum

Earlier in this Deep Dive, I touched upon the idea of the pug map versus the strategic map. It’s a pretty simple concept, so I’m not going to bother to explaining it, but if you don’t understand it…

Well, seek help. There’s nothing I can do for you.

I think it’s best to view the map pool as being on a spectrum - which, considering you’re reading an article about the CS map pool right now, is probably an easy concept for you - on one end of the spectrum, you have Nuke, the king of the tactical maps. On the other end, you have the king of the pug maps, Mirage.

In my opinion, neither of these maps should ever leave the map pool. I know that will anger the Mirage haters out there, but you have to understand, Mirage is by far the most played map in CS. It’s never going anywhere.

They should never leave the pool because they’re the best at what they do, and that should always make them the two cornerstones of the entire ecosystem of CS, whether it’s the most casual players who play once a week, or the freaks like me who have long forgotten how to actually close the game.

By utilising this idea of the spectrum, though, we can also correctly place the other maps within the map pool to create a healthy map pool, which, in my opinion, requires three tactical maps, three pug maps, and the map that sits perfectly in the middle of them all.

How to solve the map pool problem

So, what does that mean the perfect map pool is?

Let’s start with the tactical maps. These are the maps that you love to watch, and love to play even more if you actually have four friends who still play the game. If you’re a solo player, though, they’re absolutely rancid.

These maps are Overpass, Nuke, and Train. Three maps I consider to be exceptional. However, given that there are only three of them, and I suggested that the map pool should always contain three tactical maps, you can begin to understand where the map pool can quickly become stagnant - but we’ll get to that.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Mirage, Ancient, Dust2, and now Cache. Four maps that can all be elevated with some tactics, and are often underrated in terms of their strategic depth due to their strengths as pug maps.

Right in the middle, we have Inferno, and regrettably, Anubis, too. These are maps that have strong, largely unavoidable tactical sides, but can also be effectively pugged on, too. Personally, I’d like there to be an extra map in this category, not just for the sake of map pool freshness, but also because I think Anubis is w-nk.

That means that across the middle ground and tactical portions of our spectrum, we need two new maps in both so that we ultimately end up with a total of eleven maps. At that point, Valve are free to get creative with map pool changes, and can even swap out two at the end of each Major cycle, rather than just a head-scratching change like subbing out Train for Anubis.

It still won’t be perfect, map pools are way too divisive to ever be perfect, but it will be far better than what we’re dealing with now.

Just as long as Vertigo stays far, far away.