Counter-Strike 2 vs Valorant: Will promise of improved tick-rate mark the end of Riot's shooter?

Valve's Counter-Strike 2 promises to deliver better performance than any game in the franchise has done. This, among other things, could mean a potential disaster for Riot Games' Valorant if players decide to jump back to their original ship. The upgrade to CS:GO has been in the works for a while now and the hype around it had been building up for the last couple of weeks.

In a surprising move, Valve finally confirmed yesterday that the title is slated to be released in Summer 2023, with the limited testing period starting immediately.

The Counter-Strike vs Valorant debate has been going on ever since Riot's character-based tactical shooter came out. However, considering the latter was a newly developed game that incorporated more advanced tech, it was considered to have the upper hand. With the release of Counter-Strike 2, that edge doesn't look quite so sharp anymore.

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Can Counter-Strike 2's sub tick-rate architecture potentially kill the growing Valorant scene?

To answer this question, it is important to understand what tick-rate is to begin with. It is the frequency at which a server can process and respond to information it receives in a game. In FPS titles, this translates to how quickly all sorts of movement and fired bullets are registered. It can make a world of difference when peeking angles, leading to the infamous concept of peeker's advantage.

Developers have been attempting to maximize the power of their servers to process information as fast as possible in order to minimize the gap between a command entered by the player and it coming into effect in-game.

When Valorant came out in 2020, it was the first game to offer 128-tick servers at launch. This gave Riot's FPS title a significant edge over its immediate competition in CS:GO and Overwatch 2, both of which ran on 64-tick servers for the most part. Riot also kept making improvements to this aspect over years since the game's initial release.

Counter-Strike 2 has been announced, and with it the concept of sub-tick rate architecture. It aims to do away with the concept of latency between clicks and actions for all practical purposes by eliminating the gap between ticks altogether.

The question that arises then is whether players who switched out of CS:GO for Valorant will come back, ebbing the fast-paced growth of the character-based FPS title.

There is no doubt that the tick-rate of a shooting-based game is one of its most important aspects, and this new mechanism will lure a lot of players. However, there are also other equally important factors to take into consideration while answering a question like this.

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How will Counter-Strike 2 counter the cheating problem?

Cheating can be a huge turn-off when it comes to competitive games. CS:GO was plagued by cheaters and bots, which ruined the gameplay experience. Valorant, on the other hand, has one of the most robust anti-cheat mechanisms in place called Vanguard, which even got a new performance upgrade recently.

Among the many announcements made by Valve regarding the new features coming to Counter-Strike 2, there hasn't been a comment on a new anti-cheat mechanism.

It is still very early days and more updates have been promised before the game's Open Access is released this summer. Having said that, it will be quite disappointing to have such a smooth gaming experience ruined by a plethora of cheaters coming into games regularly.

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Conclusion

Counter-Strike and Valorant have the same central focus, which is shooting and planting and defusing an explosive device. The latter, however, also has a lot more strategic complexity in the form of Agent abilities.

The two titles also follow entirely different aesthetic builds. There are a lot of people who still prefer the latter's cartoon-esque character model and world design over CS's more realistic build.

Riot Games has also proven itself to be a master of content production, delivering skins and tidbits of lore from time to time, which also goes a long way in keeping the community hooked.

While the arrival of Counter-Strike 2 will definitely make the market much more competitive, it will be a bit of an overstatement to suggest that it will kill the Valorant scene entirely.