by The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) community was rocked last weekend with the news from journalist Richard Lewis that Valve is close to releasing a successor to the FPS released in 2012. According to the British, the developer of North America plans to make available a beta version of an update to the game, called “Counter-Strike 2,” as early as March.
Lewis also noted that the game was developed using the Source 2 engine, as expected by the community for years, and that a team of CS:GO professionals has already tested the new game at Valve’s headquarters in the city of Seattle, United States States The information caused a lot of speculation and anticipation among fans.
What is a Source 2 call?
Released by Valve in 2015, Source 2 is a “game engine”, a term whose literal translation in Portuguese would be similar to “game engine”. Simply put, it’s a computer program that allows you to create games. It unifies and allows you to work simultaneously on different aspects such as graphics and physics.
Source 2 was used in the development of titles such as Half-Life: Alyx and the enhancement of Dota 2, which debuted in 2013 based on the original Source engine, but was adapted for the modernized version of the program. With CS:GO, the situation was different.
The game was released in 2012 with Source as the engine, but was not ported to the more advanced engine until later. Now, some 11 years later, according to the version published by Lewis, the developer seems to have made the decision to use the improved program to create a new optimized version of the FPS.
Like content creator Gabe Follower, who closely follows the updates that CS:GO receives, there are those who believe that the news that Valve brings will be a process of adapting to the new engine, similar to what happened with Dota 2. Thus, this text deals with the first case.
What news can the game bring?
The biggest expectation for the project so far titled Counter-Strike 2 is a graphical improvement using Source 2 as an engine. It’s very possible that this will happen, but it’s hard to know for sure at what pace this development will happen, since increasing the fidelity of the game’s appearance tends to decrease accessibility.
This is certainly an aspect that has been well evaluated by Valve, as it affects the scope of the market that the company intends to reach. Creating a better looking FPS results in the need to have better computers to run it smoothly.
Apart from this aspect, all the possible innovations of the new version of CS are very speculative. In this sense, the community has long pointed out many areas of improvement that can now be addressed.
One is about the issue of switching to 128 tikrate servers in the official matchmaking system (MM). This measure would improve the game’s response time to the user’s command, being more faithful to everyone’s reaction capabilities. Currently in CS:GO, Valve’s MM takes place on 64 tickrate servers. According to Richard Lewis’ article, this optimization will be confirmed in Counter-Strike 2.
A better ranking system is also expected in competitive matches. The current patent system is not very transparent with the fans of the game. It does not expose clear win parameters or performance indicators necessary for player level progression.
There are still many other possibilities for improvement, such as bug fixes, hitbox adjustments so that different agent skins have no advantages or disadvantages to each other, internal changes to maps or even the map pool available for competitive matches.
What is specific to Counter-Strike 2?
Apart from the British journalist’s findings, there is little information available about Valve’s work. One of the most solid pieces of evidence on the matter gained traction with Gabe Follower’s revelation via Twitter.
Along with the Aquarius leak, he noticed, in NVIDIA’s drivers, the presence of support for two programs called “cs2.exe” and “csgos2.exe”. According to Gabe, these executables appeared as options in the North American company’s graphics card control panel in mid-February.
Additionally, last Monday, he found, in the latest update Dota 2 received, files related to how CS:GO would work on Source 2. However, the new data made Gabe, contrary to expectations, conclude that the game should not have 128 tickrate servers on the new engine.
The developers would work on a new structure to prevent players on the same server from having different percentages on the theme and benefiting or losing from it.
— I don’t think CS:GO on Source 2 will introduce the 128 hit rate [nos servidores]. Based on the records [vazados] in Dota 2 updates, the developers are working on a new “tick-free” system — the content creator posted via Twitter.
However, despite the community’s efforts to get information about the game’s news, Valve has yet to come out officially on the matter. That way, fans have to endure the stress for a little while longer until news about the Counter-Strike universe is made official.
