Back in February Valve removed Dust2 from active duty and placed it into the reserves group. In other words, they pulled it from tournament play in order to rework and rebalance the whole map. And now, nearly a year later, the remastered version of Dust2 has finally made its way to the test servers along with a new version of the "Leet Krew" player models!

As you might expect given their work on Nuke and Inferno, the remastered version of Dust2 has brought with it very few gameplay changes. A couple of random bits of scenery have been moved around, but the general flow of the map is still exactly the same. What did change, however, is visibility. Pretty much the entirety of Dust2 has been lightened up in order to make players stick out from the background, especially in some overly dark areas such as the tunnels towards B site. A much needed change given how it gave certain characters a small but annoying advantage.

I'll reserve my judgement for when its fully released, but so far I must admit the new Dust2 does look like a pretty damn good rework. But don't just take my word for it, give it a try yourself! Simply head over to Steam, opt into the beta client, and you'll be roaming the dust-swept streets in no time.

If you prefer to familiarize yourself with all of the changes before jumping in, however, make sure to give the official blog post a look. And finally, let me send you off with a couple of images showing the two different versions of Dust2 side-to-side (the old one is left, the new one is right):