I have been playing CS1.4 for a few weeks now and I have established a firm opinion of what I think is good and bad about it.
First of all is the major topic that every CS player is concerned with,
Jumping
I have played on several servers. One had almost normal CS jumping aside from you couldnt jump in quick succession, but it didn't force you to move at a snails pace directly after a jump. Another server was worse. You still couldn't jump in quick succession but you were also incurred a speed penalty after a jump. This made perfectly normal non bunnyhopping manovers quite annoyingly slow. For instance jumping up a tiny ledge to move round into cover was almost pointless as you were rendered a sitting duck as soon as you jumped. What I found confusing is that jumping had this penalty but if I fell from a distance and ended up with 5 health from the impact I could still move off almost immediately while a 1.5 foot jump in the air caused me to slow down after landing. Also when you press shift (or whatever key you have configured for walk) there seems to be a strange slowdown before you are walking, and the same for when you let go of shift again. Not sure I like this but I guess I'll get used to it.
Connecting to a server
My initial connection to a 1.4 CS server resulted in 3 attempts to connect over a period of about 7 minutes (on BT ADSL (512k)). After finding out a bit about Valve's Steam Content distribution system I figured that most of this time was taken up downloading game files/maps since the initial setup of steam and subscription to CS dealt with the game system files (downloading minimum footprint...)
After this initial lengthy connection most connections have been almost as quick as the ones for CS1.3. I guess the initial slowness was down to the following reason quoted from ShackNews...
From
Shacknews.com - Gabe Newell of Valve Software :
Right now in the Steam beta we ignore everything you have on your hard drive when we start up Steam and create a CS install from scratch - this was done to put as much as a load on the Steam back-end as possible. Now that we've been through that process Steam will simply update what you already have rather than replacing it. This means a lot fewer bits will have to go over the wire when a user switches to Steam.
One thing I haven't figured out yet is the extent of the weapon changes. The para seems a little more accurate but I haven't purchased it enough and played about with it to find out if this really is the case. The scout seems to have undergone either power or accuracy (hopefully not both since I am not a sniper) alterations, either that or some scout experts from previous CS versions have been stalking me on servers
Also something that I was quite releaved to hear was that there are no plans to make CS a pay-to-play game
From Shacknews.com :
Shacknews: What about monthly fees or pay-to-play options?
Gabe: First off I want to stress that we have always tried to give gamers a lot of value for their money. If someone bought the original Half-Life and has kept current with all of the updates, MODs, and so on, they probably think Half-Life was the best value they've ever gotten for their money.
That's not going to change.
For some customers it may make sense for them to go with a subscription rather than a one time fee. If you haven't ever bought a Valve game before, you might want to pay a $9.95/month fee rather than paying for Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Counter-Strike, Gunman, etc... individually. Sure I may pay more in the long run, but in the long run Valve is hopefully going to come out with more games so that it makes sense that I'm getting a lot of value.
On the other hand if I've already got a bunch of Valve games and CZ comes out, I'm probably not going to be interested in paying a subscription just to get CZ. I'll just want to buy it the way I've always bought games - for a flat fee.
The tracker for connecting to games, messaging friends in games and such like is a blessing since I used to dread doing a server list update as this meant CS was tied up and I couldn't play until it had finished. This can now be done ingame so you don't have to sit and watch a list be updated :grinthumb
I quite like the new cs_havana and de_chateau although often when I have been on a server people have moaned as though the maps were as bad as oilrig.
I think its just a case of people getting used to them. They like what they know and once they know the new maps will probably moan less or not at all when it comes to their slot in the server map rotations.
More details about steam, steam CS and downloads can be found at
steampowered.com
The latest bug fixes and changes can be found
here, last updated to V4.04 04/04/2002....