Valve Reveals 'Counter-Strike 2' Coming Summer 2023

Counter-Strike 2 is real!

After weeks of rumours and speculation, Valve has finally revealed Counter-Strike 2 bringing Counter-Strike onto the new Source 2 engine, and announced it will launch in Summer 2023.

Counter-Strike 2 was announced through a series of YouTube videos that reveal some of the big changes coming to the game, from the new world, to smokes and grenades and updated maps. Valve then released a tweet confirming that it is all real and coming later this year.

One of the biggest changes is to smokes and how they work. Now they will be responsive with bullets being able to pierce holes through them, and other grenades having an impact on their bloom. This will have a massive impact on how Counter-Strike is played.

Valve also revealed that some maps have been completely rebuilt for Counter-Strike 2, whereas others will just take advantage of new features such as improved lighting and otherwise will not be changed at all. Classics such as Mirage appear to only be ported over to the new engine with no changes, whereas others such as Nuke were shown with impressive new lighting effects and old favourites such as Overpass were revealed as totally reworked using new tools that will be available to the community.

It was also revealed that tick rates on servers have been totally removed, with sub-tick updates removing the need for servers to only update at certain intervals. While this will no doubt have a massive impact on premium server services, it will be a welcome update to those who only play on the base game and don’t use external providers.

It was also confirmed that all skins from CS:GO will transfer over to Counter-Strike 2, and every single one of them will benefit from the new engine with improved lighting effects.

The update will primarily be focused on bringing Counter-Strike onto the updated Source 2 engine. Having initially been made in the original Source engine, the update to Source 2 is long overdue, with rumours of such an upgrade being around for years. Dota 2, Valve’s other major game, was updated to the Source 2 engine back in 2015.

The shift to the new engine brings a lot of behind-the-scenes changes that should make further development significantly easier and hopefully will improve the general performance of the game, however, that may come at the cost of increased resources that are required to run it.

It seems we still have a while to wait before we can get hands on with Counter-Strike 2, unless you managed to get into the limited test, but this announcement is a massive step for the game and will hopefully set up Counter-Strike for the next 10 years of its life.

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