It’s been over two decades since the original Counter-Strike game launched and became one of the world’s most popular and memorable competitive shooters, but a fully fledged sequel is supposedly just around the corner. According to a new report from Richard Lewis, a journalist who is best known for his long record of Counter-Strike-related stories, including 2015’s match-fixing scandal, a new installment dubbed Counter-Strike 2 is not only real, but about to be unveiled soon, with a beta dropping as early as this month. Built on the Source 2 engine, some of Counter-Strike 2’s new features are said to include an improved match-making system, as well as 128-tick servers.
From a Richard Lewis report:
The sources explained that the creation of the game had been something of a priority for Valve’s team, which includes members that have overseen development of previous iterations in the Counter-Strike franchise. This, they said, should explain why some issues with CS:GO have been largely unattended to for some time. “The big priority is getting this out and then polishing it, fixing any bugs and bringing it up to the level people expect from CS.”
Specific details of the game included that it will, of course, be on the Source 2 engine, a move that should improve the optimisation and graphical fidelity of the game. That is likely to come at a cost of performance for players with low-end PCs, although Valve historically has always had a philosophy of empowering those with every-day gaming rigs to be able to play their games.
The big question for the community has been whether or not official servers would be 128 tick bringing it in line with rival title Valorant. The sources confirmed that this would be the case and that this feature would likely be ready at the launch of the beta.
The game is also set to include a much improved match-making system with features that it is hoped would make the need for third party pugging services unnecessary. Currently the community has had to suffer from uneven match-making and long times between rank ups. Most who want an experience more closely aligned with that of a competitive player are typically advised to sign-up for third party services such as FACEIT. These features will be an ongoing work in progress but the beta will launch with similar match-making features that are available in the current version of CS:GO.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →Oooh. I did wind up calling it :p
I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day :p
2 seems like a curious name for it though.
Lets see. The Half-Life mod was beta 4 through 1.6
then there was Source
then Global Offensive
Now 2?
Now THIS to me is way more interesting.
It reminds me of the rest of that conversation from a few days ago...
I'm excited to see where this "Source 2 Engine" will go. Hopefully some developers will start using it as an alternative to endless Unreal Engine titles.
Nothing wrong with Unreal Engine.
Lets not forget there are a couple of other engines that have traction in the market. Frostbite from EA, and Lumberyard from Amazon off the top of my head.
I don't think EA licenses out Frostbyte, similar to how Creation or Luminous don't get licensed out beyond their internal developers either. Lumberyard might be dead, it was based on a licenses Crytek deal and something went wonky with that. Now it's O3DE, which I think cut all ties to Crytek.
But you aren't wrong - Unity is probably about as big as Unreal when it comes to third party licensed engines. Gamebryo finally is dead I think, I don't think it's been updated in about as long as Source - those were other big ones back in the day. I've seen idTech occasionally get used outside of Bethesda, but nothing from the more recent iterations. CryEngine is still getting updates, but I don't know of a whole lot that's still using it recently (2020's Hunt Showdown is about the most recent I can find) and Crytek has had financial troubles in the past few years so it's a lot smaller than it was 10 years ago.
Wait what's wrong with Unreal Engine?
Has a reputation for causing studder when it tries to compile shaders in real time.
Afaik EA was forcing internal devs to use the frostbite engine which caused issues in games like dragon age inquisition and anthem among others.
Source however has been used by Respawn for their titanfall games and Apex legends, I think it's solid, but underused same with Idtech though call of duty games are still based on a heavily modified itdtech.
I know that the unreal engine seems to be the go to these days, but it also has its share of problems but it's hard to say if they are purely the engine's fault or the developpers who have issues using it optimally.
Popping textures is a common problem as well, but that may have been a historical issue, as I have not seen it as much in more recent versions of the engine.
That, and in general it just looks off sometimes.
I'm not a fan, but it seems like almost every game I am interested in uses it these days.
I have to say, I'm not a developer so I'm not really a fan of any particular engine. I really only care about the games.
Some Developers can do amazing things with it seems just about any engine. Others do their best to grind a great engine into the ground.
I am sure that each engine has it's tradeoffs, but all of that ~should~ be more or less transparent to the end-player: those problems are all developer problems, and I don't really blame the engine for anything. If it's a big enough problem that it affects the game play, then the developers didn't do their job right, that isn't on the game engine, imo. If they can't make the game engine do what they want, they chose the wrong game engine for their project.
Yeah cuz it hasn't had a particularly strong start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2#Games
I did not realize it was something that had been around that long.
I wonder why it hasn't seen more adoption.
I can think of three reasons:
I'm betting on mostly 1 or 3.
Lack of updates / active development.
Things at Valve only happen if someone decides to take an interest in it and run with it. I think the folks who were working on Source just kinda... drifted to other things. So it's just been like any other dead open source project. I dont think it had been touched for years (probably since the initial SteamOS push many years ago to ensure Linux compliance) until they needed to make some tweaks to get it to play nice with Steam Deck.
So it's lacking in pretty much all features that have been introduced since ... 2015 or so? And has only got basic bug fixes and minor updates since then.
And if no one is actively developing the engine - who's around to provide support?
Yeah, I wouldn't want to hang my hat on that engine if I were developing a new game either.
I guess that as well. UE has pretty much dominated in recent years and to such a degree that some developers (CDPR and 4A with Metro) are even abandoning their own engines rather than trying to update or make a new one. There are probably more examples but those are two big ones I can think of off the top of my head.
It's a real shame. I can certainly see how all the maintenance and updates make managing your own engine cost prohibitive, but at the same time, we have all seen what happens when just one player in a market becomes dominant.
Exactly my fear as well.