Report: Counter-Strike 2 Announcement Set for This Month

[Tsing]

It's been over two decades since the original Counter-Strike game launched and became one of the world's most popular and memorable competitive shooters, but a fully fledged sequel is supposedly just around the corner. According to a new report from Richard Lewis, a journalist who is best known for his long record of Counter-Strike-related stories, including 2015's match-fixing scandal, a new installment dubbed Counter-Strike 2 is not only real, but about to be unveiled soon, with a beta dropping as early as this month. Built on the Source 2 engine, some of Counter-Strike 2's new features are said to include an improved match-making system, as well as 128-tick servers.

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[Zarathustra]

Oooh. I did wind up calling it

That's really funny.

I was just talking about how it might be time for a new version of Counter-Strike to bring it up to 2014 era graphics

Do I get to say "CALLED IT?"

Not sure if a new engine is needed.

They could just use the existing engine and add more detailed models and better textures.

The whole point of CS:GO is to remain relatively low tech so that it has mass appeal even among those who play on potato machines, so they would unlikely be shooting for the latest and greatest RT based immersive environments.

Updating it from its current ~2007 standards to what, like 2014 standards is maybe what we would be talking about.

I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day

2 seems like a curious name for it though.

Lets see. The Half-Life mod was beta 4 through 1.6
then there was Source
then Global Offensive
Now 2?

Built on the Source 2 engine, some of Counter-Strike 2's new features are said to include an improved match-making system, as well as 128-tick servers.

Now THIS to me is way more interesting.

It reminds me of the rest of that conversation from a few days ago...

No need for any new features in the engine to do that.

Besides, even if they wanted to add a sprinkling of RT, the source engine was designed to be modular, so it probably wouldn't be an overwhelming task to add the capability to that to the rendering module. Still, that would probably cost more in developer time than it is worth to them, unless the engine were also to be used for something else.

I think it is very unfortunate the source engine was not kept up to date. As an engine I like it way better than the engines that have taken the lead today. Unreal Engine is annoying. I would have loved to see what an up to date Source engine could do.

But Valve realized they could make more money as a sore front for others products than making their own products, so it didn't make sense for them to do that.

Valve would have to get back into being a game developer to even care about such things.

Probably, yeah. Unless they want to go the route of of Epic and maintain an engine they sell to everyone else for development, but that ship has likely sailed, as just about every developer out there now is fully trained and experienced on the Unreal Engine environment, so it would be a tough sell to get them to change to something else, unless there was a huge financial incentive to do so, which means less profits (or maybe even running the effort at a loss for a while).

Even so, when Source was the coolest engine on the block ~20 years ago, it looked good compared to others, and the interface and console command structure was nice to work with. I would have loved to see what they could have done with it had they tried.

I'm excited to see where this "Source 2 Engine" will go. Hopefully some developers will start using it as an alternative to endless Unreal Engine titles.

 

[Dan_D]

Nothing wrong with Unreal Engine.

 

[Grimlakin]

Lets not forget there are a couple of other engines that have traction in the market. Frostbite from EA, and Lumberyard from Amazon off the top of my head.

 

[Brian_B]

I don't think EA licenses out Frostbyte, similar to how Creation or Luminous don't get licensed out beyond their internal developers either. Lumberyard might be dead, it was based on a licenses Crytek deal and something went wonky with that. Now it's O3DE, which I think cut all ties to Crytek.

But you aren't wrong - Unity is probably about as big as Unreal when it comes to third party licensed engines. Gamebryo finally is dead I think, I don't think it's been updated in about as long as Source - those were other big ones back in the day. I've seen idTech occasionally get used outside of Bethesda, but nothing from the more recent iterations. CryEngine is still getting updates, but I don't know of a whole lot that's still using it recently (2020's Hunt Showdown is about the most recent I can find) and Crytek has had financial troubles in the past few years so it's a lot smaller than it was 10 years ago.

 

[LeRoy_Blanchard]

Wait what's wrong with Unreal Engine?

 

[Brian_B]

Wait what's wrong with Unreal Engine?

Has a reputation for causing studder when it tries to compile shaders in real time.

 

[Denpepe]

I don't think EA licenses out Frostbyte, similar to how Creation or Luminous don't get licensed out beyond their internal developers either. Lumberyard might be dead, it was based on a licenses Crytek deal and something went wonky with that. Now it's O3DE, which I think cut all ties to Crytek.

But you aren't wrong - Unity is probably about as big as Unreal when it comes to third party licensed engines. Gamebryo finally is dead I think, I don't think it's been updated in about as long as Source - those were other big ones back in the day. I've seen idTech occasionally get used outside of Bethesda, but nothing from the more recent iterations. CryEngine is still getting updates, but I don't know of a whole lot that's still using it recently (2020's Hunt Showdown is about the most recent I can find) and Crytek has had financial troubles in the past few years so it's a lot smaller than it was 10 years ago.

Afaik EA was forcing internal devs to use the frostbite engine which caused issues in games like dragon age inquisition and anthem among others.

Source however has been used by Respawn for their titanfall games and Apex legends, I think it's solid, but underused same with Idtech though call of duty games are still based on a heavily modified itdtech.

I know that the unreal engine seems to be the go to these days, but it also has its share of problems but it's hard to say if they are purely the engine's fault or the developpers who have issues using it optimally.

 

[Zarathustra]

Has a reputation for causing studder when it tries to compile shaders in real time.

Popping textures is a common problem as well, but that may have been a historical issue, as I have not seen it as much in more recent versions of the engine.

That, and in general it just looks off sometimes.

I'm not a fan, but it seems like almost every game I am interested in uses it these days.

 

[Brian_B]

That, and in general it just looks off sometimes.

I'm not a fan, but it seems like almost every game I am interested in uses it these days.

I have to say, I'm not a developer so I'm not really a fan of any particular engine. I really only care about the games.

Some Developers can do amazing things with it seems just about any engine. Others do their best to grind a great engine into the ground.

I am sure that each engine has it's tradeoffs, but all of that ~should~ be more or less transparent to the end-player: those problems are all developer problems, and I don't really blame the engine for anything. If it's a big enough problem that it affects the game play, then the developers didn't do their job right, that isn't on the game engine, imo. If they can't make the game engine do what they want, they chose the wrong game engine for their project.

 

[DrezKill]

I'm excited to see where this "Source 2 Engine" will go.

Yeah cuz it hasn't had a particularly strong start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2#Games

 

[Zarathustra]

Yeah cuz it hasn't had a particularly strong start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2#Games

I did not realize it was something that had been around that long.

I wonder why it hasn't seen more adoption.

I can think of three reasons:

1. UE has such critical mass now (everyone already knows how to use it so it is easier to keep using it)
2. Some technical shortcoming in the Source2 engine that makes it difficult to use or less capable
3. Licensing structure making UE engine cheaper to start work on

I'm betting on mostly 1 or 3.

 

[Brian_B]

I can think of three reasons:

Lack of updates / active development.

Things at Valve only happen if someone decides to take an interest in it and run with it. I think the folks who were working on Source just kinda... drifted to other things. So it's just been like any other dead open source project. I dont think it had been touched for years (probably since the initial SteamOS push many years ago to ensure Linux compliance) until they needed to make some tweaks to get it to play nice with Steam Deck.

So it's lacking in pretty much all features that have been introduced since ... 2015 or so? And has only got basic bug fixes and minor updates since then.

And if no one is actively developing the engine - who's around to provide support?

Yeah, I wouldn't want to hang my hat on that engine if I were developing a new game either.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I'm betting on mostly 1 or 3.

I guess that as well. UE has pretty much dominated in recent years and to such a degree that some developers (CDPR and 4A with Metro) are even abandoning their own engines rather than trying to update or make a new one. There are probably more examples but those are two big ones I can think of off the top of my head.

 

[Zarathustra]

I guess that as well. UE has pretty much dominated in recent years and to such a degree that some developers (CDPR and 4A with Metro) are even abandoning their own engines rather than trying to update or make a new one. There are probably more examples but those are two big ones I can think of off the top of my head.

It's a real shame. I can certainly see how all the maintenance and updates make managing your own engine cost prohibitive, but at the same time, we have all seen what happens when just one player in a market becomes dominant.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

just one player in a market becomes dominant.

Exactly my fear as well.

 

[DrezKill]

Oooh. I did wind up calling it

Yupz:

 

[Denpepe]

Unity is still around, iirc it's used in quite some games.

 

[Brian_B]

Unity is still around, iirc it's used in quite some games.

It's used in a ~lot~ of mobile games, and I think it has a larger marketshare than Unreal does (one site claimed 50% marketshare for Unity vs 17% for Unreal) - mostly by virtue of Mobile being a larger space than PC/Console. Not that Unreal doesn't work on mobile - it does - it's just that Unity is used more there.

 

[Zarathustra]

Yupz:

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.