For those of you that missed the community news, CEVO (along with Brutesmaps) has released a remade version of de_cbble called "de_forge". If you still need to download the map, you can do so here. I asked the mapmaker, Brute, what his goals were in creating this map:

"My goal for de_forge was to design a map that kept the most important elements from de_cbble, as well as adding more options for terrorists to choose from. I wanted to keep the integrity of cbble throughout the map, add my own style, and make the map more appealing visually."

Competitive play on this map starts in less than a week so let’s take a look at what's been changed.


Team Spawns

The Terrorist spawn has been revamped completely. There is no longer a tower on the terrorist side and all of the routes exiting T spawn are changed. Also, all the spawn points are on the ground so you no longer get the split-level T spawns as on cbble. The spawns are also slightly closer to the halls and to T mid. To counter that, the CT spawn has been moved up, which makes it even and speeds up the game play by taking out the excessive distances that needed to be run when leaving the spawns.



If you exit spawn towards the right, you can go through the halls like in the old cbble or head out to the terrorists side of middle. There are some minor changes to the hallway, but once you walk through it you will see that it's basically the same thing. The only big change is a new route to B, but we'll come back to that.




Terrorist's Middle Area



As you can see, the window room for the CT's has been removed but the rest of the area has only received some aesthetic changes. The layout of the middle ramp and A halls are almost identical designs to de_cbble, but without the ladder of window room up top. What this does is dramatically limit the amount of areas that the terrorist side has to worry about checking. On de_cbble, working through middle on terrorist required you to either be extremely noisy and spam every possible spot, or use up almost all of your smokes and flashes just to get through the area. Now this isn't a problem and various strategies can be used. This change also allows the map to be played faster due to limited areas that the terrorists now have to check.