Quote from Puddy14 hours ago, Puddy said: To begin with, I would argue against selecting a theme that is associated with a very recent terrorist action, especially one which falls in the "rampage shooting" category.
Furthermore, sharing a location name with a recent and horrific terror attack is, in all honestly, a bit tasteless. Counter-Strike is, in a way, a game about terrorism but at the same time, it's not. It's a shooter with two teams that uses counter-terrorism operations as a "skin" to ground it in reality. All the levels in the game are relatively nondescript and don't reference any real world scenarios. The terror organisation the game has expanded upon the most, the Phoenix Connection, is purely fictional. All kill:able characters in the game are combatants and the "bombings" in the game are directed at material targets.
I'm not so sure about CS being completely fictional. Many of the maps and factions are based very closely to real scenarios and organizations. The only difference is the removal of insignia really. One good example would be the "Separatists" which I'm sure any Spanish person is familiar with.
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The Phoenix Connexion also used to have Croatian flag patches in the official game art, pretty clearly eluding to them being Ustase.
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Anyways with that being said I agree it's not right to outright recreate awful terror attacks in CS, but on the other hand it shouldn't stop us from mapping altogether. Crazy psychopaths have killed, bombed, etc in pretty much every country/location in the world and if we didn't want to remind people of that, we wouldn't be making maps in a game about terrorism. I think Pulse was definitely too provocative of a name, but it wouldn't be right to ditch the map theme altogether, because that would mean nobody could make maps about public transit, france (and europe in general now 
), the middle east, tall buildings, etc.