Counter Strike has been the same game for 23 years, basically every new game is an “update”. Porting the game to Source 2 is the single biggest thing that has happened to Counter Strike since 2004 when they moved from GoldSrc, so might as well brand it as a new game.

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Just update a current game and put a 2 on it?

It was a “ground-up” rebuild on Source 2, so while it carries forward all the CSGO content and aims to “play the same” in terms of movement and gunplay (with the exception of improvements like subtick actions), I’d say it’s way more of an actual “2.” New engine with all kinds of fancy lighting and other improvements, new assets (including weapon and character models, some of which were still originally in the 2013 CSGO launch), remakes and retouches of maps, vastly improved map-making tools, some nifty accessibility features (your walking sounds appearing on the radar) and quality of life features (selling back misbought items, or the picture-in-picture grenade throw practice camera), and some huge balance changes (games are now shorter, players now need to more strategically choose their weapons, smoke grenades are voxel-based and can be cleared out with gunfire and grenades, skyboxes are now open for grenade tosses, etc.)

It looks the same but with some lighting changes on the surface, but it’s actually huge.

Despite some minor changes the game has played fundamentally the same since 1999.

Edit: also CSGO came out 11 years ago, compared to the 6 years between overwatch 1 and 2.

Just update a current game and put a 2 on it?

This is how the software engineering industry works. It’s actually games that are the outlier here, with their big releases each time a sequel is made.

More visibility would definitely help here though, odd that they don’t put a banner on the store given how big of a release this is for many players.

I had audio issues too and fixed them by adding %command% -sdlaudiodriver pipewire to the launch options.

Yes

Well, seeing as how CSGO is F2P, everyone owns it. And, CSGO itself is gone, it’s now just CS2.

This is just CS:GO finally evolving from the CoD brown-tinged visuals of 2007-2013

No? There’s more color, but it’s reasonable CSGO always had a kind of dull color grading/textures, though updates changed that A bit later on. A lot of players turn up saturation themselves for the (at least perceived) benefit of visibility so that might be what you saw, you also see CS players playing in 1024x768 stretched still because that’s how they always played before.

They definitely gave it that trendy sunny slightly hazy day look. I’m not complaining it’s a much nicer aesthetic than the original release of CSGO which felt like a Seattle afternoon in the middle of the desert.

The saturation doesn’t look any different to me when on my own machinr, the streamer may have changed their color settings on their GPU for a number of reasons. Visual clarity can be important for seeing targets quickly, as well as maybe wanting to stand out when scrolling in a feed so viewers see their stream stick out?

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You can set max matchmaking ping in the settings, this has been a thing for years.

Doesn’t setting max ping fix it for you? Or is the servers themselves that are the problem?