Following weeks of speculation over Valve’s plans for a 25-year celebratory Counter-Strike update to, the developers have finally broken their silence with The Real MVP patch, a surprise June update packed with content including five new community-designed maps spanning multiple game modes—a first in CS2.
Valve announced the update on June 25 in a blog post which included the maps, a revamped MVP UI system, an adjustment to how players earn ranks in Competitive (not Premier), and a variety of bugfixes. We’ve seen community map updates in the past, particularly alongside the launch of a CS:GO operation, but this time the focus is on the maps themselves.
Two maps have been added to the CS2 Competitive pool: Thera, designed by FMPONE and based on the classic map Santorini, and Mills, a new map that sees players battle in the streets of a small Dutch town.
We were given a preview of Thera as early as April 2023, with FMPONE regularly teasing players with new screenshots of the Greek infrastructure that dots the map.
Also included in today’s CS2 update are two maps designed for Wingman: Memento, set in a lavish Italian village by the sea, and Assembly, a packed aircraft hangar with heaps of nooks and crannies to hide behind as players hunt each other in the two-vs-two duo mode. Finally, CS2‘s first Arms Race map, Pool Day, sees players go head-to-head in the weapon-swapping mode in a public pool and its surrounding facilities.
Today’s update also includes a shiny new MVP card that appears after a round concludes, with unique custom animations for multikills, plants and defuses, and grenade damage in Premier. A preview of what each MVP card looks like was posted on X/Twitter by content creator ALE.
For those chasing a classic per-map Competitive rank outside of Premier, you’ll now only need two wins to earn a rank. Previously, the 10-win requirement turned many away; with 11 maps in the pool, getting 10 wins on each to earn a rank was a tall order.
A bunch of bugfixes and new video settings round out today’s update, and while it’s not a full operation, it’ll undoubtedly be great to jump back into CS2 and its fresh locales. The detailed patch notes for the June 25 CS2 update are here.
