14 DAY TRIAL // While Valve has been cuddling some of its games, like Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2, its older titles haven't received any serious attention in a long time. The last big update Counter Strike: Source received was in 2007, with the introduction of the Pure Servers and the "sv_pure," which was a very unwelcome decision by the community. As such, some are starting to think that, for games to be popular enough to receive Valve's affection, they need to carry "the mark of the sequel," the big 2.
Talks about an upgrade to CS have been going around for some time now, with the Pro Mod being the biggest one of them. As for work from Valve, one of the last talks about CS2 was all the way back in 2008, when Valve's Gabe Newell firmly said that Counter Strike 2 was not something that we might find in the next Orange Box. But we also heard Doug Lombardi, the VP of marketing for Valve, saying that it "will never abandon Counter Strike." Even so, every time the topic of CS2 pops up in a Valve conversation, all we get are crickets.
And now, five years after the game was released, the community has decided that enough is enough, and a petition has been started, with CS fans from across the globe signing to get CS2 developed. The main thing the petition tries to draw attention to is the slow death of what was once the most popular first-person shooter on the PC. But while the market for multiplayer FPS is definitely here, Valve hasn't given any signs that it plans to resurrect the title. Modern Warfare 2 brought back the genre, and especially the multiplayer matches, into the public eye like no other game, but with the PC implementation Infinity Ward gave it, PC players didn't get all that much out of it.
So, if you want to keep the game alive, you can head over to either the petition's facebook page or its official site and give it a John Hancock and a reason for trying to keep it alive. After all, back in 2008, he said that if he got 50,000 replies to CS2 not being right around the corner, he might reconsider the game's cryogenic status. If Valve does something with the title, hopefully it will remember to not repeat mistakes of the past, like Dynamic Pricing, but fixing the buggiest issue in CS: Source would require a new engine entirely, so that would explain the wait.
The entire Source Engine has proven to have a serious problem with hitbox registration, something that even the ultra-polished Left 4 Dead 2 suffers from. And while this isn't really a problem in games like HL2: Deathmatch or Team Fortress 2, in CS:S, where aiming and weapon fire needs to be very precise and pinpoint accurate, it can be a nightmare. Nothing can be more frustrating than getting killed after you've already turned the corner because your hitbox "shadow" didn't keep up.