Strange CSGO bug makes players’ heads disappear during games

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a weird and hilarious bug at the moment involving disappearing heads.

CSGO players have noticed a fairly obvious issue in public matchmaking games in which players’ heads are disappearing at random. Once they’re gone, they remain gone for the duration of the game, even lingering into the post-game screen. One Reddit user showed off how it looked in one of their recent games, drawing laughter from fellow fans.

According to the player, as they were playing they noticed that one of their teammates was missing the head portion of their character model. The headless player still behaved normally and opponents were able to still register headshots on them, but the head was missing and the player could see inside their hollow character model.

Notably, this issue wasn’t present for the other players in the game. The presenting player was the only one that was seeing the model without a head, and the issue likely would have been remedied by simply disconnecting and reconnecting to the match. Still, it’s an unusual bug in CSGO and one that could present obvious problems if a player were rendered unable to see an opponent’s head in-game.

Why did a CSGO player’s head disappear?

While this is an unusual bug in CSGO, this has been something of a standard bug in Valve titles. Portal 2 players saw this early on in the game’s lifespan and Dota 2 players have dealt with this on a constant basis. The bug stems from portions of character models not loading properly due to how the game handles skins in relation to the character models.

Because of the sheer number of cosmetics in Dota 2, this is a more lingering issue in that game. Heroes can be left bald due to their hair skins not loading in, or left without a visible weapon they’d normally be wielding. This ramps up all the way to having characters left naked and faceless with an almost completely featureless body.

This has been seen in CSGO in a number of different ways in the past. Players have seen teammates’ bodies disappear, leaving all their equipment floating in place or opponents being wholly invisible. Thankfully, these bugs seem to be rare and are fairly easy to fix if it’s a serious enough issue that it’s actually affecting the player’s game experience.