I’m excited. I’ve been playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for 11 years now, since its release in 2012, and it’s gone from being a LAN party curio to my go-to game I’ve sunk literally thousands of hours in, whether I’m testing hardware or testing my mettle in its online matchmaking. I’m joined online by 1.5 million concurrent players, and even when I take a break from playing, I follow the thrilling competitive scene that awards millions of dollars in prize money to its participants each year – not bad for a slow-paced, strategic shooter series that started life as a Half-Life mod in 1999.
The game has continued to develop and evolve all this time, but for the last few years developer Valve has been quiet – no new operations, Counter-Strike’s take on a battle pass, have been released, once-frequent weapon balance tweaks have ceased, and updates of any kind have slowed to a crawl. That’s because, since Half-Life Alyx was released in 2020, Valve has been secretly working on a new Counter-Strike: Counter-Strike 2. I’ve been taking part in the game’s Limited Test, and despite some technical failings typical of pre-release software, I’m having a blast.
We’ll take a closer look at Counter-Strike 2’s technical changes in a Digital Foundry analysis soon, but the basics are the game ditches the old Source engine, based on DirectX 9 and originally released in 2012, for Source 2 and the modern Vulkan graphics API. Source 2 launched for Dota 2 in 2015 and a souped-up version powered Half Life Alyx in 2020, so it’s hardly brand new, but clearly the development effort to rebuild a game more than a decade old in a new engine was substantial.
With this new foundation in place, the way for future upgrades and improvements ought to be clear – and Counter-Strike 2 is expected to launch this summer with enough new features to justify the new numeral. The three big ticket items are dynamic, volumetric smoke grenades, which realistically fill spaces and can be shot or grenaded to temporarily carve gaps; a new lighting model that combines with upgraded assets like maps, weapons and agents to improve graphical fidelity; and a ‘tickless’ networking model that trades the old rigid 64-tick update rate for one that sends shots, grenade throws or movement micro-seconds after it occurs. Other elements, like the user interface and blood spatters, have also been reworked so CS2 feels like a fresher, more modern game, befitting its 2023 release date and a packed roster of alternative shooters like Valorant, Fortnite and Warzone 2.