Hints of CSGO Source 2 beta hidden in new Dota 2 update

M Alzamora Published 10/04/2021

Valve added nearly all of CSGO’s shaders and entities to Dota 2 today with the MOBA’s massive Dawnbreaker Update.

Danger Zone is shaping up to be one of the first parts of CSGO to make the jump to Source 2, judging from the Dota 2 patch. 10 minutes after Dota 2 fans met the game’s new hero, Valve pushed another update to the game that changed the signing on its maps. The patch didn’t seem to add anything new, but that’s because the hidden additions had nothing to do with Valve’s popular MOBA.

Valve hides CSGO’s Danger Zone in massive Dota 2 patch

There weren’t any creeps or scepters in this second Dota 2 patch, but Hostage Zones, security doors, and almost all of the shaders CSGO relies on to draw its playspaces. Valve essentially hid them twice, once stuffed inside Dota 2’s pak files and once again embedded inside the game’s actual maps. Between the 10-minute gap and the extra trouble Valve took to hide Danger Zone’s port, It seems as though the developer attempted some slight of hand as it moved the assets.

With players enamored with all the other bells and whistles of Dota 2’s 7.29 patch, Valve likely expected to be able to sneak this one past data miners in the wave of bug fixes that followed. But SteamDB’s Pavel Djundik unpacked the maps almost as soon as they landed on hard drives.

Somehow Valve managed to put the content inside Dota’2 maps without increasing their size, leading some to think that Valve revealed the move intentionally. After all, why use millions of hard drives when it could walk it across the office. Either way, the compressed shaders and Source 1 entities mean that CSGO’s Source 2 development is much closer than anyone had thought possible. It’s an exciting day for CSGO fans, especially now that Valve publicly moved the largest amount of CSGO assets to Source 2 in history.

Interestingly, Valve first tested embedding things in a game’s maps nearly three months ago, but it didn’t try it with CSGO or Dota 2. Instead, players noticed compressed entities in Team Fortress 2, hinting at the increasing possibility that other Source games are set to join CSGO on Source 2. Source 2 will give Danger Zone a much larger area for the battle royal mode’s maps, and that means devs will probably bump up the Zone from 20 to possibly 30 or 40 players. Overall, it doesn’t matter if players are Dota fans, CSGO fans, TF2 fans, or just fans of Valve.

It’s a good day because big things seem to be on the horizon.

M Alzamora

About M Alzamora

There are few things that writer M Alzamora loves more in life than Pokemon. And there are even fewer things that she loves more than her favorite Pokemon, Eevee. But M’s appreciation for gaming isn’t just limited to Nintendo’s famous pocket monsters. She’s interested in every type of game across every genre of gaming, and she has the credentials to prove it. M’s work has also been seen on Working Classicists and gaming sites.

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