Valve will "never abandon" Counter-Strike

By Tom Bramwell Published 4 March, 2008

But has nothing to say about a sequel.

Valve says it will "never abandon Counter-Strike" but currently has nothing to announce regarding a sequel.

During a recent interview on GameTrailers, VP of marketing Doug Lombardi said the big question was how to approach any follow-up to the last instalment, Counter-Strike: Source.

"Do we go start over from scratch and build this whole new game, do we do something that looks more like Team Fortress 2 that is rooted in the old game but has a ton of new stuff, or do we just sort of take everything that's new that we've released and whatnot and put that out in a new box?" he asked rhetorically.

"I think we're leaning more towards the two more radical places than just sort of rolling up the new box and re-skinning the box and putting out all the new stuff."

And despite pressure, Valve uber-boss Gabe Newell had nothing else to add, saying only: "Counter-Strike is an incredibly important product to this company."

He did say though that a CS successor probably wouldn't be a good fit for another Orange Box-style compilation product.

What do you reckon, Eurogamers? What would be best for Counter-Strike? Apart from always running with the knife, idiot. And not throwing a flashbang into the tunnel on Dust unless you can f****** throw.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (20) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • hiddenranbir #1 4 years ago

    I can see why it is important to them. So many freakin' people still play it. (Me included on occasion!)

    I think the best they can really do is just to continue supporting it.

    By the by, I've not had much notice of it anymore: did Dynamic Weapon pricing j ust go away or have my private servers I've been playing on firmly kept it turned off?

  • rudedudejude #2 4 years ago

    I have heard climbing is the future...or something...

  • BadBoyBonner #3 4 years ago

    The peoples CS follow up is already widely available - it's called CoD 4.

  • asphaltcowboy #4 4 years ago

    What would be best for CS? Err.. bury it, it's rubbish!

  • Gartt #5 4 years ago

    Id like to see a new Counter Strike at some point in the near future, CS:S is still my most played game today.

  • skillian #6 4 years ago

    Counter-Strike is awesome, and I doubt very much if the sequel will ever manage to be quite as popular, so they can't drop support.

    It would be amazing if Valve could come up with a sequel as influential and addictive as CS, but games like that only come around very rarely, and CS has already been around for 8 or 9 years without being beaten yet. CoD 4 and TF2 are great games, but neither are "the new Counter-Strike", and won't ever pick up the kind of enduring following that CS did/does, IMO.
    Edited by 1 at 04/03/08 @ 11:11

  • KillallHippies #7 4 years ago

    Although if they could put CS Italy into COD4 i would be very happy.

    CS: Source is great, you feel more achievement when you kill people on CS than on any other game.

  • stepneg #8 4 years ago

    Why can't they bring CS Source out for live, even a premium download for the orange box would do??

  • Carrybagma #9 4 years ago

    HL2:Ep3
    Half-Life1 (source)
    CS (source/redux)

    All in one box. That would be very nice.

  • Wyrm #10 4 years ago

    CS is so popular because of it's purity. It's perfect as it is, the mechanics work flawlessly. The only thing they can really update are the graphics and maps. The idea behind the game cannot and should not change.

  • Davey #11 4 years ago

    @ BadBoyBonner

    CoD4 doesn't come remotely close. It may have loads more features but it's the pure gameplay that counts.

  • wayn3h #12 4 years ago

    @Wyrm; I agree 100%.

    I still play CS:S daily and when it comes to PCW's and leagues I'm still with good ol' 1.6. hehe

  • smoison #13 4 years ago

    Valve stopped supporting cs and CS.source a while ago. When was the last map or weapon they added?

    CS used to be about regular updates, until Valve took over and made source.

    I was a CSS regular until COD 4 showed up, to bade Valve dropped the ball.

  • jlaakso #14 4 years ago

    CS is the best PC gaming I've had. I haven't played the Source version at all and it's been years since the last time, but man, there's just nothing wrong with that game.

  • symmetry #15 4 years ago

    COD 4 Search and Destroy is a direct rip-off of the CS bomb missions.

    Which is why I play that all the time.

  • robg #16 4 years ago

    It's true, I'm almost more likely to play CS than CS:S these days - you can only accidentally bounce off so many barrels!

  • YourMessageHere #17 4 years ago

    CS/CSS was never a pinnacle of excellence, it's simply the meeting of accessibility and realism. I for one would welcome any amount of quite small but significant changes. Dynamic weapon pricing was an interesting idea and it could have gotten quite interesting if it had been made slightly more configurable (e.g. max/min prices per server). However most CS players are ultraconservative when it comes to making changes to "their game" so I doubt I'll ever see anything like clip-based reloading, size of weapon affecting mouse sensitivity, configurable weapons, iron sights, prone, leaning or any of the many other things that other games do better.

  • Davemanz #18 4 years ago

    Well, ironsights, leaning, and prone wouldn't just be changes, they'd be significant. I wouldn't want that, and it's not that I'm ultraconservative about how the game gets updated. I'd like to see new features, but anything that would kill the fast pace of everything wouldn't feel right.

  • Grim... #19 4 years ago

    Every now and then they should update the graphics and sound - other than that, they should leave it the hell alone.

  • YourMessageHere #20 4 years ago

    From where I sit, the fast pace IS the problem; I like to be careful and cautious when I play that kind of game, and be rewarded for it, but if I try to play CS like that I always get nailed by someone in a way I cannot hope to emulate, since they have obviously spent hundreds of hours honing movement techniques to the millisecond and learning the maps to the pixel. But then, because I got sick of that, I never play online any more, while those that do obviously like it the way it is. I suppose basically I like the idea of CS better than the execution.
    Edited by 1 at 05/03/08 @ 00:40