{"id":27054,"date":"2023-03-28T13:16:45","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T12:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/counter-strike-2-is-already-a-blast-and-lays-the-groundwork-for-years-to-come\/"},"modified":"2023-03-28T13:16:45","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T12:16:45","slug":"counter-strike-2-is-already-a-blast-and-lays-the-groundwork-for-years-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/counter-strike-2-is-already-a-blast-and-lays-the-groundwork-for-years-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"Counter-Strike 2 is already a blast &#8211; and lays the groundwork for years to come"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>\nI&#8217;m excited. I&#8217;ve been playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for 11 years now, since its release in 2012, and it&#8217;s gone from being a LAN party curio to my go-to game I&#8217;ve sunk literally thousands of hours in, whether I&#8217;m testing hardware or testing my mettle in its online matchmaking. I&#8217;m joined online by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/csgo-keeps-on-smashing-its-own-all-time-concurrent-user-peak\">1.5 million concurrent players<\/a>, and even when I take a break from playing, I follow the thrilling competitive scene that awards millions of dollars in prize money to its participants each year \u2013 not bad for a slow-paced, strategic shooter series that started life as a Half-Life mod in 1999.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe game has continued to develop and evolve all this time, but for the last few years developer Valve has been quiet \u2013 no new operations, Counter-Strike&#8217;s take on a battle pass, have been released, once-frequent weapon balance tweaks have ceased, and updates of any kind have slowed to a crawl. That&#8217;s because, since Half-Life Alyx was released in 2020, Valve has been secretly working on a new Counter-Strike: Counter-Strike 2. I&#8217;ve been taking part in the game&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.counter-strike.net\/cs2\">Limited Test<\/a>, and despite some technical failings typical of pre-release software, I&#8217;m having a blast.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nWe&#8217;ll take a closer look at Counter-Strike 2&#8217;s technical changes in a Digital Foundry analysis soon, but the basics are the game ditches the old Source engine, based on DirectX 9 and originally released in 2012, for Source 2 and the modern Vulkan graphics API. Source 2 launched for Dota 2 in 2015 and a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/digitalfoundry-2020-half-life-alex-tech-analysis\">souped-up version powered Half Life Alyx<\/a> in 2020, so it&#8217;s hardly brand new, but clearly the development effort to rebuild a game more than a decade old in a new engine was substantial.\n<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/counter-strike-2-is-already-a-blast-and-lays-the-groundwork-for-years-to-come\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Source &#8211; eurogamer.net<\/p>\n<p>All content and images belong to their respected owners. This article is aggregated for informational purposes only with full credit to the source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m excited. I&#8217;ve been playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for 11 years now, since its release in 2012, and it&#8217;s gone from being a LAN party curio to my go-to game I&#8217;ve sunk literally thousands of hours in, whether I&#8217;m testing hardware or testing my mettle in its online matchmaking. I&#8217;m joined online by 1.5 million<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":27055,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,35],"tags":[105,1357,1048],"class_list":["post-27054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-releases","category-ps4","tag-excited","tag-ive","tag-im"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Counter-Strike 2 is already a blast - and lays the groundwork for years to come | Xtreme Servers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"View Counter-Strike 2 is already a blast - and lays the groundwork for years to come for free, here on XtremeServers. Discover more great articles on our site. Join us today.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/counter-strike-2-is-already-a-blast-and-lays-the-groundwork-for-years-to-come\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Counter-Strike 2 is already a blast - and lays the groundwork for years to come | Xtreme Servers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"View Counter-Strike 2 is already a blast - and lays the groundwork for years to come for free, here on XtremeServers. Discover more great articles on our site. 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