Fans have been waiting for a Source 2 port of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive since the engine’s release in 2015.

By: Christina Kasch, Mizzou Esports Blog

Photo caption: Valve updated the CS:GO Twitter banner at the end of February, catalyzing speculation about a new game.

The Counter-Strike series will be seeing a new entry in the summer as announced by Valve on March 22nd. The multiplayer tactical first-person shooter was designed as a mod for Half-Life, released in 1999. After being acquired by Valve in 2000, a full game titled Counter-Strike: Source introduced the Source engine to the world in 2004. This is the same engine which would be used for the current iteration of Counter-Strike released in 2012, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. CS:GO is currently the most popular game on Steam, with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players.

Fans of the Counter-Strike series have been speculating about a Source 2 port of the game for years, with hopes that a rework of the game would bring bug fixes and stability that weren’t in the original. Content updates and bug fixes have been released continually for CS:GO, supporting the game in the decade since its original release. However, Valve has remained silent on their plans for the series since the release of Source 2 in 2015. 

On March 1st, a Twitter user by the name of Gabe Follower 2 posted that the latest drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards included support for a game called Counter-Strike 2. Since then, fans have been searching for every piece of information about the game they can find. Leaked Steam updates were found to be running on the new engine. A new file named “cs2.exe” was found in the files for CS:GO. Hidden entries were added to the CS:GO blog, commonly used to post details about updates. These hints all culminated in an announcement on March 22nd, with Valve finally releasing details about the mysterious new game.

Counter-Strike 2 is being launched in summer 2023 but select players are able to join a limited test happening now. A “subset” of features are currently being tested, according to the Counter-Strike 2 website. These include changes to the way smoke grenades function, a complete graphical overhaul, and a move away from the tick rate system used in CS:GO. A “tick” is an interval where the game processes information. Official CS:GO servers have a tick rate of 64, meaning that the game updates 64 times per second. This can create issues when a player shoots a bullet or throws a grenade between two ticks. The game won’t register the action, giving the player a disadvantage. Counter-Strike 2 uses a new “subtick” system, allowing the game to update the instant a player takes an action. 

Needless to say, Counter-Strike 2 will be a massive upgrade over the decade-old CS:GO. It also succeeded in bringing new life to Counter-Strike, which some may say has faltered in recent years against rivals like Overwatch 2 and Valorant. CS:GO has hit a peak of 1.5 million concurrent players since Counter-Strike 2 was announced. 

Counter-Strike 2 launches in the summer on PC for Valve’s game distribution platform, Steam. Until then, select Counter-Strike players can participate in the limited test and experience the newest the series has to offer.