A new CS:GO operation, named Operation Riptide, has been officially added by Valve. Riptide features tons of new additions to the game, including the addition of private queue, team and free-for-all deathmatch, shorter competitive matches, and a ton of new cosmetics, gameplay changes, and maps.
Operation Riptide is the 11th operation in CS:GO‘s history, and the first since Operation Broken Fang ended on May 3, 2021. Riptide will last until Feb. 20, 2022, according to the operation page on the CS:GO website.
One of the biggest features being added to the game with Riptide is private queues. Players can create their own private Premier matches, and make them private to only friends, friends and their friends, or a Steam group.
Valve has also added different versions of their iconic competitive and deathmatch modes. Players can now play a short competitive mode, that plays up to sixteen rounds or until one team wins nine rounds. Valve has also officially added free-for-all and team deathmatch, no longer requiring players to browse community servers to access those specific modes.
New gameplay changes have also been added. Players can now drop grenades the same way they do weapons and the bomb. They’ve also added more body damage to the M4A1-S, while reducing body damage for the Deagle, and reducing the price of the Dualies. For casual hostage maps, they’ve also introduced a riot shield for CTs to equip.
Alongside all these changes to gameplay and game modes comes lots of new content, in the form of maps, skins, agents, sprays, and more. Five new community maps have been officially added: County, Ravine, Extraction, Insertion II, and Basalt. Several new weapon skin, sticker, and patch collections have been added, as well as the Riptide agent collection.
With a new operation comes new operation challenges, which yield a plethora of rewards if you purchase the operation pass. Purchasing the pass gives you an operation coin to level up by completing challenges.
