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. 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. 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. ![]() That's because, since Half-Life Alyx was released in 2020, Valve has been secretly working on a new Counter-Strike: Counter-Strike 2. 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. 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. 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. Hopefully, this test will give us a little better idea of what the game’s future holds.I'm excited. It will be fascinating to see if this game can please hardcore Counter-Strike fans while giving new, or lapsed, players a proper excuse to dive into this pretty intense shooter series. Furthermore, while Counter-Strike remains one of the monsters of the eSports scene (and a regular top game on the Steam charts), this sequel is going to have to compete with not just Valorant but the many other live-service multiplayer games that already demand so many hours of players’ time. Riot Games’ Valorant has courted quite a few Counter-Strike fans in recent years, and it’s going to be interesting to see how many of those fans return to CS (or find room for both). ![]() Still, the timing of this release is interesting. Actually, some fans felt that they would likely just release CS: GO updates for the rest of time rather than try to make a Counter-Strike sequel. After all, Valve doesn’t exactly rush to release new games (or even substantial updates to their games), and Counter-Strike has long been one of the company’s most popular and successful titles. ![]() It sounds like relatively few people will be able to play Counter-Strike 2 right away, though many more people will certainly be watching others play the game. However, Counter-Strike 2 will not allow you to modify existing items within the Limited Test version of the game. Progress in Counter-Strike 2 will carry over to CS: GO, and you can access your entire CS: GO inventory during the Counter-Strike 2 test. The good news is that Counter-Strike 2 and CS: GO appear to have a pretty harmonious relationship. However, the game’s FAQ page seems to suggest that the Limited Test will be accessible up until Counter-Strike 2‘s full release, so it seems reasonable to suspect that additional invites will occasionally be issued up until then. Valve will continue to invite additional players to the limited test over time, but there is currently no word regarding when those invites will be distributed, how they will be determined, or how long the limited test will last.
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