The new game, on the Source 2 engine, would be ready for release as soon as this March.
CSGO’s Twitter account changing its banner and members of the community tweeting about an NVIDIA driver update with support for two unknown executables, “cs2.exe” and “csgos2.exe,” got the game’s fans riled up with hopes of the Source 2 version of the game coming for the umpteenth time.
No information was directly communicated by Valve and with history dictating that hype around new versions of the game wanes as fast as it comes, it appeared that this would just be another time when fans would be disappointed in regards to a follow-up to the massively popular CS:GO. Now, however, anonymous sources have reached out to journalist Richard Lewis with information that this time is different.
Not only could this be the time the new game comes, probably under the working title Counter-Strike 2, it will arrive imminently according to Lewis’ sources — this ongoing month of March is the target, up until April 1. “The big priority is getting this out and then polishing it, fixing any bugs and bringing it up to the level people expect from CS,” Lewis quotes from a source. Another direct quote from one of the sources is that the game is “about ready to go.” So much so, apparently, that it has already been secretly tested by a group of professional players at Valve’s headquarters.
According to the report the game will come with 128 tick rate servers as well as new and improved ranking and match-making, as opposed to the current 64 tick rate servers and dated systems that sent many current Global Offensive players to third party platforms such as FACEIT.
One big question Richard Lewis highlights in his article is how the new game’s integration will be in the esports scene. Will the coming CS2 coexist alongside CS:GO, or will it replace it? Only Valve knows, but historically it would be the former. Looking at the recent DOTA2 move to Source 2, the two games coexisted only momentarily before the improved version took over. Be as it may, when it comes to esports, Lewis notes that judging by the past “there is likely to be a lengthy period of balance and feature overhaul before the game is fit for competition.”
