Is Valve planning something big for CSGO's 20th anniversary?

As Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's 20th Anniversary approaches, Valve seems to have something on the way.

Last year was the unofficial 20th anniversary of the Half-Life mod that would come to be known as Counter-Strike, but 2020 marks the game's official 1.0 release under Valve. As Dota 2, Left for Dead 2, and other Valve titles have seen updates and events over the past several months, Valve's CSGO developers have focused mainly on cleaning up CSGO from the inside.

But a recent update to CSGO's Latin American translation files made a multitude of additions concerning operations and how they are displayed in the South American countries that use those translation files.

More translation updates to CSGO code make ready for a new operation

The changes aren't just differences in how specific phrases are translated, either. These changes add new lines for the LATAM files. It's important to note that these lines have existed in the other versions of CSGO's translations, including the English version.

But as CSGO grows in popularity around the world, Valve continues to make sure that every file inside CSGO's different language files all follow the same template. The work that is being done on Valve's end makes sure that if they decide to change a file in one language, that same change can be made to a different language file as easily as possible.

The majority of changes inside CSGO's LATAM files expand on the tooltips and translations that appear when players hover over certain elements of CSGO's user interface. Once again, these translations haven't added anything new, but they continue to build CSGO's underlying foundation by creating exact replicas of files across languages. 

No one knows when CSGO's next operation is coming, but CSGO developers have taken a fine-toothed comb over every section of CSGO's code over the past several months. The majority of the changes haven't touched the English translation files but have brought all other languages up to date with the English translation, and that file is usually the first file updated when Valve adds new content to CSGO.

• Valve's recent code changes are making way for something big

By making sure that all the files are close copies of one another, it becomes a much more simple task for developers to add translations for new modes, activities, and items to CSGO. Because of how different the translation files used to be from one another, that used to be a difficult task that relied mainly on CSGO players to send in the correct translations for certain phrases. While Valve most likely has a better way of changing things internally, theoretically they can now just use Control+F.

CSGO's 1.0 Anniversary is on November 9th, and a new update would be a neat and tidy way to start the week. As players have seen from Valve in the past several weeks, "neat and tidy" is the developer's new middle name.