Valve announces Counter Strike: Global Offensive

BOOM. HEADSHOT. FPS Doug immortalised the ridiculousness of Counter Strike fans years ago, myself included. Valve’s 2004 reboot, Counter Strike: Source remains one of the most successful e-sport FPS games to this day. It’s immensely popular and is the definitive example of what a finely tuned multiplayer shooter can be.

To the combination of great fanfare and trepidation, Valve announced over the weekend that Counter Strike would finally see a follow-up, this time labelled Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Announced for PC, XBLA, PSN and Mac, the game will feature new maps, characters, arms and obviously to placate the fans, updated versions of classic content.

I could bet my life that we’ll see de_dust, de_dust2 and cs_office return. It’s being co-developed by Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment and should hopefully see release in 2012.

PC gaming blog, Rock Paper Shotgun, has more details alongside the marketing churn via an interview with Craig Levine from ESEA. This included mention of classic maps, Inferno, Nuke and Train, and that’ll be running on a modified version of the Source engine. It might worry some, but he stated that:

“It didn’t feel like 1.6 and despite being built on the Source engine, it didn’t feel like CSS. By design, Valve wanted to create a game with a different feel, and overall it was really smooth.”

There’s also the news that Molotov cocktails and decoy grenades will be included. The full ESEA information-spooge can be found here.

Via: Steam
Image Credit: PlaystationLifeStyle

Macgasm's Gaming correspondent. Lover of technology who can be found on Twitter. More detailed musings are located at my blog.