CS:GO Source 2 has been rumored for a while now, with fans of the biggest game on Steam expecting the online shooter to get upgraded imminently to the same engine powering Half-Life: Alyx. Well, CS:GO Source 2 is now a reality, and it even has gameplay footage. It just doesn’t come from Valve.
A team of game-makers and modders, represented by the long-standing Valve content creator channel Gabefollower, has rebuilt CS:GO in Source 2 from the ground up, using the community creation platform and spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod, S&box. The team claims that they have remade CS:GO without using a single line of code from the original game, and has created all the systems and mechanics from scratch. At the moment, the project is still in its infancy, with the first gameplay footage simply demonstrating a “vertical slice” which will be continually updated in the future. However, the team claims to have developed this within six months, suggesting that a full version may not take an enormous amount of time.
In July, an exploit in Discord’s rich presence feature — which allows players to display game data on their profiles such as score, duration, and map — was used to determine that a new version of CS:GO was being played. Its map names used the suffix “s2”, which led some Valve content creators, such as YouTube’s Tyler McVicker, speculating that this signaled the game was being tested at the studio internally. Regardless of Valve’s own progress on CS:GO Source 2, the Gabefollower team says it will eventually release its own version as an open-source game. “Counter-Strike: Source 2 is a community driven, open-source project,” the team says. “We did not use a single line of code from CS:GO and eventually we’ll publish the full C# codebase on github.”
Recently, Steam stats revealed that CS:GO players have collectively been killing one another for the last 50,000 years. There is also a new CS:GO game mode whereby hitboxes are randomized from round to round. If you want to try that out, we recommend our guide to CS:GO ranks and also CS:GO console commands. Alternatively, you might want to try something entirely different, either from our list of the best FPS games, or one of the best multiplayer games, which, of course, also includes CS:GO.