Valve Software announces 'Counter-Strike 2,' coming this summer

One of the most popular games on Steam is getting an official sequel this summer, as Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software has officially announced the release of Counter-Strike 2.

This is the latest installment in a series of military-themed, comparatively realistic first-person shooters that Valve has published and developed since 2000. In Counter-Strike, players group into two teams, the Terrorist and Counter Terrorists, and fight one another to complete objectives like planting or defusing a bomb.

Counter-Strike has been a tentpole franchise for Valve for over two decades, since its initial debut as a player-created mod for 1998’s Half-Life. The most recent game in the series, 2012’s Global Offensive, is one of the highest-grossing games on Valve’s digital storefront Steam, with a popular esports circuit, and has maintained a steady population of players for over a decade.

Valve’s official announcement of Counter-Strike 2 confirms a rumor that had been in circulation since February, when fans on Reddit noticed that a new NVIDIA driver update contained new game profiles named “cs2.exe” and “csgos2.exe.”

Off the back of that rumor, CS:GO recently set an all-time player record on Steam, with just over 1.42 million simultaneous users playing at once on March 11.

Starting on Wednesday, Valve plans to select a number of current CS:GO players to participate in a limited beta, where it will test CS2’s new features in advance of its full worldwide release.

Those new features include a number of graphics and physics improvements, such as clouds of smoke that realistically interact with lighting and the environment; more responsive interactions between players and the game’s server; and “cleaner, brighter, better” in-game worlds, which have been built in Valve’s next-generation Source 2 engine. Other new features are planned for announcement later in the year.

CS2 is planned to launch as a free update for CS:GO this summer. Current players of Global Offensive will be able to bring their in-game inventory with them into the new game.