Is the Community Ready for CS:S?

The evolution of the much-loved Counter-Strike game play through the use of a new engine was greeted with great excitement in the CS community. Anyone who really knows CS is well aware that its superior game play is one of the main reasons it has stayed ahead of game after game released to the multiplayer first person shooter community. The reasoning went that CS is a great game but its graphics are somewhat dated with Half-Life being six years old at this point, so it was believed that CS would be much improved by simply enhancing the graphical quality of the game through the introduction of CS:S.

What those early proponents of CS:S did not take into account was the hardware situation amongst the hundreds of thousands of CS players in the world. Though it is true that there are many players who have no trouble running CS:S, what seems to be happening now that CS:S has gone through its beta and is now released is what could be called a “hardware reality check.” CS players have become spoiled by the high frames per second that are attainable in our game of choice. Finding a CS 1.6 player who is content with getting less than 100 frames per second is getting rarer every day.

The “reality check” comes when players realize that even a system formerly considered well-equipped when playing CS 1.6 will only get a mid-range frame rate in CS:S. While we did, of course, know that we would need better hardware to run CS:S, the reality of it is that we balk at the idea of running a first person shooter with less than 100 frames per second. We have become so conditioned to having very high frames per second that running a game at a frame rate of 40-60 seems unacceptable.

Is this Valves fault? Of course not, Valve is simply giving us what we asked for: a better, more modern CS. As this is exactly what we had requested, I would assume that Valve believes nearly all current CS players will migrate to CS:S. The release of CS:S before HL2 was available shows that they are using the already large, active CS community to drive sales of HL2; however, I believe that Valve is underestimating the number of hardware laggards in the CS community. An older computer with a video card that is a generation or two behind will be fine to run HL2 itself, as frame rate in a single player game is not nearly as critical as having high frames per second while playing an online first person shooter. Only time will tell if this migration from CS to CS:S occurs or if these less up-to-date players will merely switch to a less hardware intensive game.