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Counter-Strike Source Beta Set for Late Summer
fistfullast33l writes "Valve has announced via Steam that a Beta version will be launched for Counter-Strike: Source, the multiplayer counter-terrorism mod that will now be updated for release with the Half-Life 2 powering Source engine. It is expected to be kicked off around late summer. Apparently: 'The beta will first be open to subscribers of the Valve Cyber Café Program, and then extended to owners of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero.' Seems like a good time to find out where the nearest gaming parlor is." This move is interesting in light of allegations of Valve bullying cybercafes - we also recently covered the South Korean unveiling of Counter-Strike: Source over at Slashdot Games.
I'm sure I'm not going to be the first to mention, but I felt a sudden surge of excitment when I read 'Counter Strike Source'... bah, why must Valve name their engine after what every geek loves?
And I just got straight A's this last quarter. Oh well, I really don't need a Master's anyway...
I would like to get back into CounterStrike with the new engine and release. I quit playing CS a long time ago due to all the cheats (not that there won't be any with the new one).
Unfortunately, it sounds like knowing when, where and how to get it and play it is going to be too much of a hassle.
Just tell me when the game will be released and where I can buy it for how much.
Yeah, at first I was also misled by the title of the article. Either way though, I think that the steam engine is horribly flawed. I really dislike "launcher" engines for games. I really wish that they could have the old WON servers for playing, however, I suppose this is their way of battling piracy for their games. I'm not sure how much it's worth to protect from piracy when it creates problems for legitimate users, but then again, since when has any company really cared about the end user?
Does anyone have any idea what's next after FPS games? Massively multiplayer games are obviously staking their claim, and casual games that rehash offline games are bringing in big money, but when are we going to see an innovative new game format?
Any ideas? Or am I totally off in left field?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Valve wants to charge $10/month/PC for access to all of Valve's games, which right now is the original Counter-Strike. This may not seem like a lot, but multiply this charge by every major game publisher and pretty soon you've strangled the nascent cybercafe industry. Valve should be encouraging cybercafes with generous licensing terms, rather than trying to squeeze every last dime of profit. The worst part is that Valve is targeting high-profile cybercafes that are trying to act as responsible members of the community, while fly-by-night strip mall cybercafes continue to fly under the radar.
Well, my site is still suffering from a slashdotting from a few days ago, but check out CS-Nation's CS: Source info section for an FAQ and of course plenty of CS: Source media.
Shameless enough? Heh.
I tried Counter-Strike no more than three times. Each time, I started to get into the game, but the maddening immaturity of the players completely turned me off after five minutes. "EAT SHIT ASSDICK LOLOL!! PWNED" got old, and when I encountered a cheater, that was the last straw.
As a matter of fact, I haven't really been into online gaming since. Nothing intrigues me. Looking forward to single-player Doom 3 and Half-life 2, thank you very much.
Like lots of other people, I gave up on CS long ago.
It was the first game that really gave me a sense of teamplay (not just team deathmatch with flags on the side), but then it went horribly wrong... as the mod got more and more popular, a ton of immature kids started playing it. with them came the cheaters. After years of ignoring it valve decided to implement cheat detection, but it was too little too late. Condition Zero was a half-assed attempt to revive it but nobody is going to spend another $30 just to have bots on an outdated engine.
If the Source engine is less prone to cheats, I may revise this, but for now I agree: It's time for CS to die.
More info about Counter-Strike source:
CS Banana FAQ
CS-Nation info page
Video
HL2.net forum post about the Seoul apresentation.
Is this a sign that Hl2 will take more time by giving a taste of their "Source Engine" (confusing name) to put the final touch on HL2?
.......(impatiently waiting duke nukem forever. #%&@(*&@#%)
I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some sort of feedback tool which asks the user why a certain crash occured and send in the report to valve. Actually I'd love to see that cause that would show they are even more serious about their game which may or may not be as fun and "big" as HL1.
We shall see in time why exactly they're taking this move but I don't like the fact of having to buy CS:CZ to get a license for CS:Source since HL2 comes with CS: Source (that's what the valve guy said in the trailer of ~35mb showing de_aztec).
Anybody have thoughts similar to mine, or am I just too suspicious?
I thought we already had the source?
source engine? where did they come up with that.. That has to be the stupidest and most confusing name for an engine.. and "counter strike source to be released" but, they probably did that to get all the people looking for the source for the source engine to get suckered into looking and something called source that doesn't have the source..
Make a bad game sell(condition zero) by giving an advanced looked at a good game
It'll be interesting to see what effect this has on the average power of personal computers out there.
It's been widely acknowledged that because of Counter-Strike and The Sims, that people have been reluctant to upgrade their machines since they can still play these two games on a relatively low powered system (by today's standards anyway).
So with Counter-Strike: Source and The Sims 2 most likely requiring a lot more grunt under the hood, will we see an explosion in new home PC purchases for these two releases?
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"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." - David Bradley, inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Del
I think not. A regular over at TribalWar has started his own LAN center and bought copies of retail CS for each machine. After installing and running the operation as usual for quite some time he got a notice from valve saying he would have to pay a rate PER machine for ALL of valve software. This does not change that the LAN centers are still having to pay 300% more for Valve software over competing software. The rate is per machine and PER month. Where it was only a grand or two for Ut2k4 one-time fee, CS was $30k a year. If Valve wants gamers happy, they have to make LAN centers happy. Now this is ridiculous that they expect people to shell out for a beta, and at the same time pay for every other piece of yea ever written.
Okay, so admittedly I'm a cynic and I still feel someone burned from the original delay, but this sounds like an artful dodge around bad news.
Supposedly "Summer" is the release date for Half Life 2, according to Valve. My guess is that the reason why they chose Counterstrike for the beta test was as a test for the net code (and possibly the graphics engine) so that they could role-up any bugfixes into same engine that Half-Life 2 would be using. With that in mind, it seems highly unlikely that they would release Half-Life 2 before counterstrike concluded it's beta testing. So if the counterstrike beta will take place in late summer, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time to go from "Beta 1" (does that imply multiple betas then?) to "done".
Here's my take: Half-Life 2 is going to be delayed 'till fall, but the announcement of Counterstrike: Source is an attempt to stave off the lynch mob. I hope I'm wrong, but Valve doesn't have the best track record. Gabe Newell is probably is probably formulating a press release this very second blaming the delay on the Sasser worm.
Don't forget RtCW and Enemy Territory.
:)
Carmack is one cool guy. Every engine he's made has been cross-platform and they are continually better than the competition. He showed that OpenGL still has some kick left in it while every other major game developer switched to Direct3D. And he's a rocket scientist. That's what I call a true geek
Btw, your constant "real geeks don't touch anything that is Windows" attitude sucks. There are lots of real geeks using Windows out there, me being one of them.
I really don't like Valve's choice of the word "Source" for their engine. I mean, obviously it has source code, but it almost seems like it's trying to trump the definition of "source". It's even more annoying when you have a GPL'd Mod for Half-Life (and in the future for HL2). "It's open source for Source which you don't have the source for." what
Going off-topic, Valve supplied an excellent SDK for HL1 but as of Steam that community policy seems to have disintegrated. We modders have no SDK for Steam or VGUI2. The updated engine interface headers to Steam is buried in the mailing list, and it has typos. They also don't have a reputation for giving clear/good answers in response to questions about working with their new stuff (forget about actual support also).
Either Valve's really, really too busy with HL2/CS2 to interact with community coders or they're just getting arrogant. I'm that CS2/HL2 continue with Valve's original "awesome SDK"-ness, especially with the underground rumor that it will have Metamod (or multi-mod sub modding) functionality built in.
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
Have these licensing practices been tested in court? I mean, if I were running a cybercafe my angle would be that I'm charging for the computer and to share my internet access. Playing the legally purchased games on the hard drives is just a free benefit.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Valve is really starting to piss me off. Instead of focusing on their next game, Half Life 2, over the past year and a half they've been repackaging the same old crap. They came out with a new version of Counter Strike called Condition Zero, they're spending time porting the original Half Life and Counter Strike to the new engine that Half Life 2 runs on. Why can't they stop making money off of the same material, and start releasing the new stuff already?
Learn something new.
I joined the CS community right around CS BETA 6 (or whatever people called it) -- when you had to buy a copy of Half-Life and install the mod and wait for the headshots. Even became part of a clan -- a local mix of teenagers and 20/30/40 somethings like myself. It was all good. We reveled in the light of several thousand servers and players.
Then, my clan went "pro" -- joined CAL and started going through the trials/tribulations of competitive gaming. "Sorry, Non-CAL Player X -- we can't 'pub' anymore because it would hurt our competitive reputation" excuses for not hanging out and just playing the game became common. But Counter-Strike seemed to remain the shiznit.
I left that clan and sought another group of people that seemed to just want to play the game, and then this new clan started losing "pubbers" to CAL and other leagues. And then it broke in half w/ the teenagers playing in the higher-end leagues and the 20/30/40 somethings getting pissed about the kids leaving them behind to play in lower-end leagues. And then the clan broke up.
This was all about the time that Steam came out of BETA and into real-world use. When I heard that CS was tied to the Steam engine, I tried it out, only to go through the initial debacle of the whole setup. And I wondered why in the world did Valve do this. I heard horror stories of LAN parties gone terribly wrong as people found they had to have the last mod version 1.5 installed + Steam in order to play at a LAN party and online. Many of the 20/30/40 somethings with whom I'd played in the clans had moved on to other games, coming back to CS when they tired of BF1942, Star Wars: Galaxies, etc.
CS: Condition Zero and Half-Life 2 kept getting pushed back. When CS: Condition Zero came out, it was...well...eh. That's it. Eh. And HL2 continues to be in the oft unforeseen future, from what I can tell.
After all this -- how can CS still be the most popular online FPS? I'm looking now at HLSW.net's search engine, and I see 24K+ Steam CS servers and 5K+ WON CS servers running. Total of about 70K players. And not a single other searchable online FPS game from this engine comes anywhere close to those numbers.
So -- I repeat the original question -- is CS still THAT popular? What keeps it going? I mean, Half-Life can be had for less than $15 now, which I would assume still earns you the license rights to download Steam and get all the games associated with Half-Life (that's how it was when I did the Steam upgrade last year).
Is it still just THAT accessible? Are the 5:00 minute team-based rounds w/ a post-mortem waiting period still the keys to the game? What keeps it alive? As great as BF1942, DesertCombat, UT2K4, and other MP FPS games have been, how has CS remained on top? Particularly with the major issue of cheating (if it's still a major issue) hovering over the game like a black cloud?
One last thought -- if CS IS still as popular as it has been in the past, do other gaming companies shudder in fear at the thought of a REVISED, REVAMPED CS game coming out with HL2? Is there concern that semi-full BF1942 or UT2K4 servers will start losing players in droves as everyone flocks to CS to see what's new?
IronChefMorimoto
P.S. - Keep in mind, I've not played the game in months, so if I've gotten something wrong here, please chime in. I'm just expressing surprise that CS is STILL getting this much attention.
Actually, valve didn't make Condition Zero. Well, they did, and they didn't, and then they did again-- this does a better job of explaining than I. The Condition Zero that's out now was co-produced by Valve and Turtle Rock Studios. Some of the missions were created by Ritual, with whom Valve had also worked. Before that, Gearbox and Rogue each had a go at making it. At this point, it's probably a little difficult to determine how much work Valve specifically has been doing for the project, as opposed to how much they've paid other studios to do, or are just taking from the mod itself. Plus, Valve isn't in the business of releasing new stuff, they're in the business of making money, so your last comment is a little bit awkward.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. -Henry David Thoreau
And I'm a real geek so that means I dont rely on Wine either.
Damn straight. Real geeks smoke herb.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Play on a well-admined server, and you'll find your CS experience much more enjoyable. I play on a server where there is NO profanity (spoken or written), no racist or pornographic nicknames, no cheating, etc... they have a ton of admins and it's rigorously enforced. What's more, if you feel you've been unfairly kicked/banned, you can lodge a protest on the group's website... bans have been overturned for unsubstantiated accusations of cheating (no demo recorded, etc).
A server run by adults, for adults, is a wonderful thing... playing with mature, responsible players... it brought enjoyment back to my CounterStrike experience.
I'd advise you to explore some more servers. Don't dismiss a great game mod because you happen to play on servers with hormonally-poisoned 13yo adolescents.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
But if the players have to have their own copy of the game why would they play at the cafe?
1) Lan party without the hassels of moving your shit
2) You have a modem for Internet access and the cafe has a couple T1's
3) You're traveling in a different city and need to get your Counter-Strike fix
I agree. It's really pretty bad-ass that they're porting Half Life to the Source Engine, and packaging it with HL2. Will be great to relive Half Life with updated graphics and physics. Also nice that people new to the franchise can play HL1 without tracking it down and purchasing it seperately.
Essentially, you're getting at least 2 games for the price of one. (possibly more if CS: Source, and other popular mods are included as well) Will definitely be worth the money when it finally comes out.
I understand where you are coming from. I am fairly new to the CS world myself, I've only been playing since steam. I have a heavy Return to Castle Wolfenstein background (former Cal-i player). Wolf was about brute force shooting and finesse. Counter-strike is about control and accuracy.
You seem to have the right idea about the burst firing. Recoil is huge also.
I started to get more sucessful when I learned how to control the spread of my bullets and the recoil. Compared to other games, the recoil in CS is huge. If you hold down the button for more then a second, you pretty much have to be aiming at the feet to get anywhere near chest level. (with different guns it varies exactly how low, ak really low, colt not so low) The better players will make their first shots count. Even while moving the first few shots of the colt are accurate. A really good player will exploit this. He will stick and move. 2 shots, move, 2 shots move. At a sniper distance, all the guns blow goats. You literally have to fire 1 shot at a time.
So here is my cheat sheet:
close: concentrate on recoil and pulling your mouse way down
medium: learn how to stick and move at headshot standing level and headshot crouching level
long range: very very controlled 1 shot at a time, pretend your rifle is a sniper rifle and you have to reload after a shot