Valve Want Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to be the Definitive Version

Over a decade after its release, Counter-Strike is still the most played game on Steam. As of this writing, there are 57,000 people playing the 1.6 iteration of the game, while Counter-Strike: Source comes in at a close third behind Team Fortress 2 with 51,000. Not bad for a game that even Valve’s own Chet Faliszek says “looks like shit.”

With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a streamlined update of the series set to drop early next year, Faliszek sat down with Develop to discuss eSports, Steamworks and the developer’s move in to consoles.

“With Global Offensive, we’re making it to be the best version of Counter-Strike, and the one that people should be playing – but we can’t force that. We need to talk with those players and try to understand their concerns,” he said.

“One of the ways to do that is with better graphics. 1.6 looks like shit, right? I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks it looks good anymore. It’s a sign of the times – if you want to see the community grow we’re going to have to up the graphics. Both sets of pros would love to see a game that sponsors would see as the definitive version so they can have bigger tournaments.”

Like Portal 2, CS:GO will be a tri-platform release, marking the series’ first appearance on the Playstation. Like Portal 2 again, the PS3 version will come with Steamworks integration, and maybe even cross-platform play.

“We’re looking at [cross-platform play]. It’s something that we’ll find out during the beta. We don’t want to hamstring one platform to another. So we’ll start the beta on PC and then at the end of that we’ll give it over to the 360 players, because we just don’t have that ability to do incremental updates and things like that on the 360.”

When asked about Steamworks on the Xbox 360, Faliszek was optimistic – at least when you consider the rocky relationship between Microsoft and Valve that keeps Team Fortress 2 vanilla.

“Maybe, we’ll see. That’s something Microsoft will has to decide. There’s some things going on with Portal 2 right now, but we’ll see.”

Develop [Counter-Strike united: Valve’s new plan]