Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), is a first-person shooter game, was created by Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment in 2012 as the fourth instalment in the Counter-Strike series. It took over two years to develop, and it was launched in August 2012 for OS X, PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360, and later in 2014 for Linux. The game is designed for multiplayer tactical gameplay.
According to Steam Charts by Steam DB, CS:GO is the most played game on Steam with more than 500,000 players worldwide (at the time of writing) and with an all-time peak of more than 1.3 million players. CS:GO is also one of Valve’s most popular and lucrative games, generated USD257 million in revenue in 2020. The immense popularity and players base might be the reasons why Valve wanted to make a sequel to the game.
According to Richard Lewis, an esports journalist, said that Valve could be planning to launch CS 2 soon. He said that his sources told him that Valve have been working on it for quite some time, under the working title ‘Counter-Strike 2’ with a tentative beta release date being this month.
According to the sources, Valve’s team considered the development of the game to be a high priority, given that members of the team had previously overseen the creation of earlier versions of the Counter-Strike franchise. The main focus was on releasing the game and then working on improving it, resolving any glitches and ensuring that it meets players’ expectations for a CS game.
He also said that the game will be running on Source 2 engine, which would ‘improve the optimisation and graphical fidelity of the game’. Besides that, his sources also confirmed that CS 2 will have server 128 tick rate. According to Pinnacle, increasing the number of ticks per second on a server allows it to process more instruction sets, resulting in better accuracy for the game’s physics, movement, and hit registration during matches
Furthermore, the upcoming game is expected to have a significantly enhanced match-making system that is designed to eliminate the need for third-party pugging services (external matchmaking servers). Although these features will continue to be developed, the beta version will initially offer similar match-making features to those currently available in CS:GO.
According to the sources, the game is nearly ready to be released, and has even undergone testing by a group of unknown professional players who were flown out to Valve’s headquarters in Seattle in secret.
Other than Lewis’s sources, a Twitter user, @gabefollower discovered that NVIDIA drivers had introduced support for two new executables, “csgos2.exe” and “cs2.exe”.
Of course, Valve didn’t say or announce anything regarding all of these, so we just have to sit and wait to see if these rumours are true.
