The video game publisher Valve will publish a big update for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in a matter of weeks, there is even talk of the possibility of a sequel. This is stated by the journalist Richard Lewis, known for his exclusives related to this popular action game, who maintains that the as yet unannounced Counter-Strike 2 “is real and is just around the corner.”
If confirmed, it would be major news for the video game industry. Counter-Strike has been the absolute king of competitive action games for over two decades. As the years have passed, competitors as powerful as Call of Duty, Apex Legends or Valorant have appeared, but the veteran FPS (first-person shooter) from the American company Valve continues to be the great reference within this genre, both for its fame as for its numbers of players and spectators.
“The new version will almost certainly launch under the working title Counter-Strike 2 and the tentative beta release date will be this March with an April 1 deadline,” Lewis says in an article on Substack ( via Forbes).
According to the journalist, this new iteration of Counter-Strike will run on the Source 2 graphics engine, which is the same on which titles like Dota 2 or Half-Life: Alyx work, and which would mean a visual leap for the game.
Another novelty that the so-called Counter-Strike 2 could incorporate would be an improvement in the matchmaking system, which is the mechanism prior to the online game that deals with the pairing of players according to their different skill levels. In addition, it would also respond to a long-awaited request by its fans, such as the increase in the tickrate, which is the speed that registers the changes that occur in the game, from 64 to 128.
Finally, Lewis also maintains that sources close to the company affirm that Valve is already testing the new version of the game with a group of professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players.
As The Verge points out, it doesn’t make much sense for Valve to make such big changes to such a popular game without much hype. A few days ago, Twitter user @gabefollower shared some images of the latest Nvidia driver update that mentioned an executable called “csgos2.exe”. One might think that it is “Counter Strike 2”, but it could also simply be a way of referring to the update of the game for Source 2. We will have to be attentive to the movements that Valve makes in the coming days.