Andrew "m0j0" MacKenzie



CS:Source is released: The silence is deafening

On Oct. 7, 2004 Valve announced the availability of Counter-Strike: Source (CS:S) to those who chose to pre-order Half-Life 2 through Steam. As I write this article, CS:S has been out for 4 weeks, yet the competitive Counter-Strike (CS) community has effectively ignored CS:S and the possibilities it presents. Why has CS:S received such a collective yawn from the CS community to date? This article will attempt to explain this apathy and show how this lack of popularity may be reversed.

Community excitement around CS:S has been tempered by two main issues. There is some question as to whether CS:S is ready for adoption by the huge and active Counter-Strike 1.6 community. Likewise, there is the question of whether or not the community itself is ready for what CS:S brings to their beloved game. Let's explore each of these issues in more detail:


Is CS:S Ready for Competitive Prime Time?

Counter-Strike, as most of you know, has not always been a commercial product. It started as a user-created mod for Half-Life and spent a good deal of time in the beta stage with its designers Jesse Cliffe and Minh Le calling the shots. The humble beginnings of Counter-Strike, combined with the manner and frequency with which it is updated – and some would say fundamentally changed – is a hindrance to the popularity of CS:S.

When a product is officially in beta testing it is expected that it can and will change dramatically within the bounds of the beta stage. Once a product is released and is no longer beta, there is an expectation that the product is finished and, while it can be enhanced, is essentially complete.

Given the above criteria, it is a stretch to call the current version of CS:S finished: it has only one player model per side; it has no anti-cheat module, though Valve Anti-Cheat has been promised for future releases but is not yet active; it has eight maps, which would at first seem to be a sufficient number, but it must be noted that those eight include three hostage-rescue maps which are typically never used in competitive league play. Also included in those eight maps are de_chateau and de_piranesi, neither of which has ever become popular despite being distributed with previous versions of Counter-Strike.

It is apparent that CS:S still has an unfinished feel, but Valve has an answer to that in Steam, a program that can obtain new content and features for CS:S as soon as the Valve development team are done with them. However, as anyone who has played Valve’s online games since the introduction of Steam will likely attest, Steam is not all good. Having an automated patch system like Steam should not allow a software company to release incomplete software to the public. The patch system should be used for repairing defects in the code at the very most. Valve must realize that this is now a piece of software that the consumer pays for, and with this price tag come expectations. Gone are the days when CS was free and the public was content with taking what they could get. The community now demands much more from Valve than they once did from the amateur programmers who originally created Counter-Strike free of charge.