Valve admits Counter-Strike 2’s launch was “bumpy” but promise a bright future

Counter-Strike 2’s launch has been met with a number of bugs, glitches, inconsistencies, and missing features from its over decade-old predecessor. Valve has admitted that CS2’s had its fair share of launch issues, but they promise that the game will quickly be fixed.

The hype for Counter-Strike 2 quickly turned to disappointment for many players. With CS:GO being phased out almost overnight in favor of its sequel, players were stuck with CS2 whether they liked it or not.

With the game replacing CS:GO’s Steam listing entirely (and adopting over a decade worth of positive reviews in the process), Counter-Strike 2 was very quickly forced onto players. This wouldn’t be a huge issue if the game wasn’t plagued by issues.

Valve have addressed Counter-Strike 2’s “bumpy” launch in an interview with PC Gamer, and, while the devs ultimately feel as if CS2’s launch has been an “overwhelming success”, they aren’t blind to the fact that work still needs to be done to get the game where they want it to be.

Counter-Strike 2 devs address launch criticism

Counter-Strike 2’s limited test run sparked a ton of excitement amongst players. Getting the opportunity to watch their favorite streamer play (or hop in themselves if they were lucky enough to get access) generated a ton of buzz around CS2 seeming to be an improved version of CSGO with a shiny new coat of paint, some mild mechanical changes, and a hyped-up sub-tick system.

However, the reality has been a bit more grim than that. People have found a lot of bugs and other oddities in the final game.

While players have surely had fun discovering new ways to break CS2, the game’s competitive integrity has been brought into question as a result of issues like these. And, on top of that, even normal gameplay wasn’t working properly. The bizarre and now-infamous Michael Jackson bug aside, players have found all sorts of ways to twist their bodies and make themselves harder to shoot.

On top of all this, hit registration has also been shown to be a bit shoddy at times, in part due to an issue with players’ hitboxes not lining up with their character model in certain circumstances.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Valve addressed both hit registration issues and whether or not sub-tick is affecting how often shots land.

“For the most part [sub-tick] works as intended, but as we rolled out the feature to more and more people we got feedback, like those clips, about systems that weren’t reaching their goals. The CS community is understandably focused on both differences and bugs that affect their experience, and we’re working hard to address them.”

Additionally, Valve claims that the hitbox bug that was affecting players’ ability to land shots have been fixed, saying that clips of issues like the one above helped them find the problem: “Bugs like that are unfortunate but detailed community feedback is incredibly helpful.”

Despite the title having a good many bugs still plaguing players, the devs view CS2’s launch as a massive success, with them not regretting the decision to release the game to the masses when they did despite its issues.

“We know there’s a conversation about whether the Limited Test should have been longer,” the dev admitted. “For sure, there are some features that would have been included in CS2 at launch if we had a longer beta. But over time, it’s not clear what the priorities should be when you have an ever-shrinking and self-selecting subset of the community participating. And without everyone playing the same game, we couldn’t make much progress on the most critical systems like networking, performance, and core gameplay. Since we’ve launched, we’ve been getting feedback about new bugs, behaviors, and issues from players at every level, from casual players on older hardware to the pros.”

Valve

They continued, “Launching the game has massively accelerated the pace of improving CS2, so we think that launching when we did was the right time, even if the landing was (and still is) bumpy. Ultimately, this is the fastest way to get CS2 to where we all want it to be one or five or ten years from now.”

That said, with some pros like s1mple voicing their distaste for the direction CS2 has taken, it remains to be seen if Valve’s bold approach to using a large player base as a testing ground to rapidly improve the game will have ultimately paid off.

For now, though, the devs termed the title’s launch an “overwhelming success” and are excited for the future. With the same interview having the devs tease new weapons on the horizon, they clearly have plans to iterate and mold CS2 into a game that’s inarguably better than its predecessor.