With Counter-Strike 2 officially out and limited testing coming to an end, the full game is available to everyone for free on Steam. Anyone who played CS:GO will now receive an update to the game that will turn it into CS2. However, if you’ve never played CS:GO or have uninstalled it, you’ll need to head to the Counter-Strike 2 Steam page to download it. For those who have played CS:GO before, all your progress and cosmetics will carry over to CS2, meaning you won’t lose anything you paid for.
Technically this is an update to CS:GO, but essentially it is the launch of a completely new game in the Counter-Strike series. The engine has been redesigned, resulting in almost everything being different, as well as some big changes to the gameplay. Perhaps the biggest of these is the new physics for smoke grenades, which will fill space and be dissipated by explosive grenades, which is expected to be a key strategy in the game at the highest level.
The new engine increases the processing power required to run CS2, so if you have an older computer you may find it difficult to run it. However, during the limited testing period, some players with high-spec machines reported performance issues, and it is currently unknown if these have been fixed in the full release.
Some players have also complained about the new subtick servers, which are designed to update the old 64-tick servers from CS:GO. However, the new system that tracks input between server ticks has led to many people thinking that moving and shooting can feel a little weird at times.
