Counter-Strike 2 Officially Announced by Valve for Summer 2023 Launch, Limited Test Incoming Today

erek

erek

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This is super exciting news!!!

"The UI in Counter-Strike 2 has gotten a complete overhaul, including fresh visual effects throughout the HUD. Not only do these improvements look nice, they also communicate important game state.

ACCURATE AUDIO

Reworked, Rebalanced, Reverbed - Counter-Strike 2 sounds have been reworked to better reflect the physical environment, be more distinct, and express more game state. They have also been rebalanced for a more comfortable listening experience.

SOURCE 2 TOOLS

The Source 2 tools and rendering features will be available for community map makers to make it easier to build, experiment and iterate. And stay tuned for the Source 2 Item Workshop, which will be available later on in the limited test.

THERE'S MORE TO COME

The Limited Test only evaluates a subset of Counter-Strike 2's features, so that major issues can be resolved before the summer. But there's much more to come. In just a few months we'll reveal all of the details of Counter-Strike 2, and we can't wait to share it with you."

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Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/306283/...ummer-2023-launch-limited-test-incoming-today
 
erek said:
"The UI in Counter-Strike 2 has gotten a complete overhaul, including fresh visual effects throughout the HUD. Not only do these improvements look nice, they also communicate important game state.
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They say while posting the usual screenshot with no UI...
 
Some highlights (brought to my attention by DrezKill )







I liked most of that, but the bullets cutting circular holes in smoke cover looked kind of dumb.

That said, while I am happy that Counter-Strike is still around as I have fond memories of it (primarily) from 2000-2002, I have long since moved on. It's not my game anymore.
 
The emphasis on tools almost makes it seem like Valve is trying to make a play for the engine market again by making Source (2) a relevant engine again.

That certainly wouldn't hurt. Unreal Engine has increasingly dominated market share among PC AAA style titles, and we've all seen what happens to a market when just one player dominates it. I think this could be a good thing if they are successful.

They are probably viewing how Epic is funneling developers into the Epic Games Store via their licensing relationship when it comes to the game engine as a direct threat to their existence, so this move makes sense.

There is a huge barrier to entry though, as so many studios are already familiar with working with UE.
 
From what I have seen of this I will give this a try. I hated CSGO but I absolutely loved Counter Strike Source and some of what I am seeing here reminds of of CSS.
 
zamardii12 said:
From what I have seen of this I will give this a try. I hated CSGO but I absolutely loved Counter Strike Source and some of what I am seeing here reminds of of CSS.
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I started playing Counter-Strike in the early Half-Life Mod betas before Valve bought it, so I have no recorded number of hours in it in Steam.

Over the years (especially in college) I probably racked up around 3,000 hours in the game.

The amount of time I spent in Counter-Strike makes me amazed I was able to graduate on time, and with honors, but somehow it worked.

At one point in college I remember remarking that I remember remarking that a week has 168 hours, and I had spent about half of those hours in game in Counter- Strike, but I was also running the Yoda's Barn gaming servers at this point, with two counter-strike servers and a Natural Selection server. So there was moderation, and keeping up with the website, etc. etc which added to the in-game hours.

Either way, I spent a ton of time in the original, most of which probably in the 1.0 - 1.3 era as I considered that the sweet spot when it was the most fun. I played from the very first public beta (beta 4? I can't remember) through to 1.6 and then Source when it came out, but most of my volume playing was in 1.0 to 1.3 somewhere.

Then I continued to play CS:Source for a few years, but my volume of gameplay dropped over the years.

By the time CSGO came out in 2012 it has been many years since I last played any counter-strike. I bought it to try it, and I have had some limited fun in the game, but I can't help but feel like the loot boxes and skins have had a negative impact on the game. That and the official servers and auto-matching has really hurt the social aspect of the game compared to back when you had your regular community servers you logged on to, and knew all of the regulars on.

I also wish there were a way to get "classic map rotations" by era, so I could bask in the nostalgia more. There were some maps that if I am honest were not very good, like de_aztec, but I still have some awesome memories of good times from.

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I still log on every now and then to see if I still got it. Sometimes the answer is yes, but often definitely no. It slowly comes back if I play a few hours, but I am going to have to admit that at this point in my mid 40's I don't have the same reflexes I did when I was in my early 20's. That and I am horribly out of practice :p

I think chances are very good I am going to buy CS2 if for no other reason than the combination of nostalgia, and to see how the game evolves, but chances of me picking it up ad playing more than a few hours here or there are slim to none.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
The emphasis on tools almost makes it seem like Valve is trying to make a play for the engine market again by making Source (2) a relevant engine again.

That certainly wouldn't hurt. Unreal Engine has increasingly dominated market share among PC AAA style titles, and we've all seen what happens to a market when just one player dominates it. I think this could be a good thing if they are successful.

They are probably viewing how Epic is funneling developers into the Epic Games Store via their licensing relationship when it comes to the game engine as a direct threat to their existence, so this move makes sense.

There is a huge barrier to entry though, as so many studios are already familiar with working with UE.
Click to expand...

They toyed with that idea when they first made Source 2, but I doubt it is now. S2 is 8 years old and was barely an upgrade over S1 S2 is laughable compared to UE5. Even random ass engines from no name developers are better at this point.
 
For sure gonna buy this! My first CS was 1.5-1.6 on dial-up internet, then CS:Source where my team won Cal-Open Championship :D I forgot what season. I play CS:GO every now and then just for fun and will likely do the same with CS:2. Hopefully the graphics are awesome but also scalable for lower-end systems.
 
legcramp said:
For sure gonna buy this! My first CS was 1.5-1.6 on dial-up internet, then CS:Source where my team won Cal-Open Championship :D I forgot what season. I play CS:GO every now and then just for fun and will likely do the same with CS:2. Hopefully the graphics are awesome but also scalable for lower-end systems.
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"Counter-Strike 2 arrives this summer as a free upgrade to CS:GO. "

So I don't think you'll need to buy it. And I think CS:GO might be going away. Graphics don't look very upgraded so it'll probably still run fine.
 
legcramp said:
For sure gonna buy this! My first CS was 1.5-1.6 on dial-up internet, then CS:Source where my team won Cal-Open Championship :D I forgot what season. I play CS:GO every now and then just for fun and will likely do the same with CS:2. Hopefully the graphics are awesome but also scalable for lower-end systems.
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I feel pretty sure they are going to err on the side of "you can run it on a potato".

20+ years ago you used to at least need a decent computer to run CS, but these days they make their money on all the marketplace transactions and keys to open loot boxes with morons hoping to get a knife skin.

The more people who can play the game, the more people who are going to buy lootbox keys.

If it were me, I'd design it with a minimum GPU requirement of an RTX2060, but that seems like it would never happen.
 
sharknice said:
"Counter-Strike 2 arrives this summer as a free upgrade to CS:GO. "
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Lol. So why even rename it. I mean, they have been piecemeal releasing updates to it ever since it launched in 2012. How is this different (except maybe there being more changes than usual all at once)?

I'm guessing there are going to be a lot of low end PC upgrades this summer then. If it were a new game, people who have very low end systems that cant handle it, could always keep playing CSGO, but if it is a free upgrade (I read this as replacement) then a lot of people will need less obsolete hardware than they were playing CSGO on.

I remember when CS Source launched, and I upgraded our primary server to Source (with the secondary server still running 1.6)

I instantly had complaints of "LAG" from kids who didn't know what low framerate was. :p
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Lol. So why even rename it. I mean, they have been piecemeal releasing updates to it ever since it launched in 2012. How is this different (except maybe there being more changes than usual all at once)?

I'm guessing there are going to be a lot of low end PC upgrades this summer then. If it were a new game, people who have very low end systems that cant handle it, could always keep playing CSGO, but if it is a free upgrade (I read this as replacement) then a lot of people will need less obsolete hardware than they were playing CSGO on.

I remember when CS Source launched, and I upgraded our primary server to Source (with the secondary server still running 1.6)

I instantly had complaints of "LAG" from kids who didn't know what low framerate was. :p
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Yeah it seems dumb to me. So did "Overwatch 2" though. It's almost the same thing.

I remember when lag actually meant network latency. It was so fucking annoying when people would call low frame rate lag. If you say lag now it has no specific meaning.

I remember when they made updates to the original CS and I could no longer run it smoothly on my Pentium 2 350hz Voodoo 3 PC. Maybe people will have problems running the upgrade, but I think they would have to be on an extremely dated rig.
 
sharknice said:
I remember when lag actually meant network latency. It was so fucking annoying when people would call low frame rate lag. If you say lag now it has no specific meaning.
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Nonsense. Lag - in the context of gaming - means one thing and one thing only, and that is unacceptably high network latency, except when you are talking about "Input lag" but then the "input" is specified.
 
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hmm im so bad at CS anymore but might still give this new one a go when it comes out
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Nonsense. Lag - in the context of gaming - means one thing and one thing only, and that is unacceptably high network latency, except when you are talking about "Input lag" but then the "input" is specified.
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He's not wrong though. And it's not specific to this game or player base at all. I see it all the time where players refer to their systems poor performance or low framerate as lag. Its almost always someone of the younger generation or someone that doesn't understand technology.
 
zamardii12 said:
Anyone else notice the explosion made the smoke cloud disappear @ 1:00 and shooting through it cleared smoke too @ 0:59? Is that new?
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Yes, they talk about it in the video.

The smoke bullet holes seem kind of unrealistic. Not sure about the explosions clearing smoke. I don't have any experience with that. It is at least feasible that a shockwave from an explosion might blow away some smoke, but as depicted it seems kind of odd.

The bullets creating basketball sized holes in the some seems kind of ridiculous though.

Then again this is Counter-Strike we are talking about. It was one of the first multiplayer games to use "real" guns, but realism overall has never been of high importance.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
Yes, they talk about it in the video.

The smoke bullet holes seem.iind of unrealistic. Not sure about the explosions clearing smoke. I don't have any experience with that. It is at least feasible that shockwave from an explosion might blow away some smoke, but as depicted it seems kind of odd.

The bullets creating basketball sized holes in the some seems kind of ridiculous though.

Then again this is Counter-Strike we are talking about. It was one of the first multiplayer games to use "real" guns, but realism overall has never been of high importance.
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It's retarded and really just gives the appearance of Valve stretching hard to justify their new engine features.
 
t1337duder said:
It's retarded and really just gives the appearance of Valve stretching hard to justify their new engine features.
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At first I thought it was a nice subtle effect that would be nice but then i just pictured a spray of bullets to clear smoke grenade clouds, or someone tosses a smoke then someone tosses a grenade to clear the room of smoke lol.

I don't have much (any) experience with grenades and smoke clouds but it just doesn't feel right to me. I've shot through smoke and it doesn't do much.
 
The smoke is incredibly gimmicky and stupid IMO. It looks like something a kid learning programming would do.

> intern/junior programmer tasked with upgrading the smoke grenade graphics
> googles how to program volumentric smoke (something that was done in games over 15 years ago)
> super excited because his copy pasted code works and the smoke now fills up actual areas instead of being a static sphere
> now he wants to apply it to everything including bullets even though it's unrealistic and stupid looking
 
Darunion said:
At first I thought it was a nice subtle effect that would be nice but then i just pictured a spray of bullets to clear smoke grenade clouds, or someone tosses a smoke then someone tosses a grenade to clear the room of smoke lol.

I don't have much (any) experience with grenades and smoke clouds but it just doesn't feel right to me. I've shot through smoke and it doesn't do much.
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Agree'ed. The nade clearning it a temp way... fine... but the bullets being able to punch holes is kinda silly. A swirl effect would really cool, but it clearing smoke doesn't make much sense.
 
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