Valorant

Valorant is a team-based tactical shooter and first-person shooter set in the near future.[2][3][4][5] Players play as one of a set of agents, characters designed based on several countries and cultures around the world.[5] In the main game mode, players are assigned to either the attacking or defending team with each team having five players on it. Agents have unique abilities, each requiring charges, as well as a unique ultimate ability that requires charging through kills, deaths, or spike actions. Every player starts each round with a "classic" pistol and one or more "signature ability" charge.[3] Other weapons and ability charges can be purchased using an in-game economic system that awards money based on the outcome of the previous round, any kills the player is responsible for, and any actions taken with the spike. The game has an assortment of weapons including secondary guns like sidearms and primary guns like submachine guns, shotguns, machine guns, assault rifles and sniper rifles.[6][7] There are automatic and semi-automatic weapons that have a shooting pattern that has to be controlled by the player in order to be able to shoot accurately.[7] Different agents allow players to find more ways to plant the Spike and style on enemies with scrappers, strategists, and hunters of every description. It currently offers 14 agents to choose from.[8][9] They are Brimstone, Phoenix, Sage, Sova, Viper, Cypher, Reyna, Killjoy, Breach, Omen, Jett, Raze, Skye and Yoru.

There are a large variety of playable agents available in the game. Each agent has a different class which indicates how the agent is usually played. Duelists are the offensive line, which specialize in attacking and entry fragging for the team. Duelists include Jett, Phoenix, Reyna, Raze and Yoru.[16] Sentinels are the defensive line, which specialize in locking down sites and protecting teammates from enemies. Sentinels include Sage, Cypher and Killjoy.[17] Next are initiators who plan out the offensive pushes. Initiators specialize in breaking through defensive enemy positions. Initiators include Skye, Sova and Breach.[18] The last class are the Controllers, who specialize in setting their team up for success. They use their heavy utility to control sightlines on the map. Controllers include Viper, Brimstone, and Omen.[19]

Valorant was developed and published by Riot Games, who have previously developed League of Legends.[20][5] Development started in 2014, within their research and development division.[2] Joe Ziegler, Valorant's game director, is credited with the initial idea of Valorant while formulating potential games with other Riot developers.[2] David Nottingham is the creative director for Valorant.[2] Trevor Romleski, former League of Legends's designer and Salvatore Garozzo, former professional player and map designer for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are game designers for Valorant.[21] Moby Francke, former Valve developer, who has been art and character designer for Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, is the art director.[22][23]

Valorant was built with two main focuses in mind: making tactical shooters and e-sports more accessible to new players, and creating a game that would foster an intense competitive scene, while solving many of the pain points that pro players from games in the genre had.[24][25][26] Games aimed at large, active communities and playerbases, typically free-to-play games like Fortnite or Riot's own League of Legends, tend to put an emphasis on a wider array of system performance improvements and game stability rather than newer technologies or more cutting-edge graphics as a way of making sure they're as accessible as possible. In interviews leading up to the game's launch, game director Joe Ziegler and producer Anna Donlon said that Valorant was built for people playing their first tactical shooter just as much as it was to professional players, and that accessibility of the game was a huge priority.[25] Professional tactical shooter players, largely playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, had complained for years while Valorant was in development about the CS:GO's competitive limitations in not meeting it's potential for system and netcode optimizations, round-trip delay, and hit registration.[27][28] These problems were only exacerbated by CS:GO developer Valve's trademark lack of communication with their community. These problems are largely due to Counter-Strike's aging underpinnings, as it was built on the same Source engine that Half-Life 2 released with in 2004. To make their own space within the tactical-shooter genre and bring a more modern and competitive game to the table, team set out to solve these problems when developing the game.[25]

In an effort to find an effective solution towards meeting the priorities of game stability and performance alongside creating a robust, competitive and responsive experience online, Riot chose to build Valorant using Unreal Engine 4.[29] This allowed the development team to focus on gameplay and optimizations rather than spending valuable time on core systems that Unreal already came with.[29][30] To meet the goal of a lower performance barrier so more people could play Valorant, the team set notably low minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the game. In order to reach 30 frames per second on these small requirements, the game's engineering team, led by Marcus Reid, who previously worked on Gears of War 4, had to make several modifications to the engine. These modifications included editing the renderer using the engine's mobile rendering path as base, or reworking the game's lighting systems to fit the static lighting that tactical shooters often require, as to not interfere with gameplay.[29] Unreal's modern underpinnings also helped to solve many of the issues that Riot set out to solve from other games in the genre, and additional modifications helped to meet the game's other goal of creating a suitable competitive environment, including optimizing server performance by disabling character animations in non-combat situations and removing unnecessary evaluations in the hit registration process.[31][25][29] During development, Riot Games made promises to work towards a ping of less than 35 milliseconds for at least 70% of the game's players.[32] To accomplish this, Riot promised servers in or near most major cities in the world, as well as working with internet service providers to set up dedicated connections to those servers.[32] Due to the increase in internet traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, Riot has had trouble optimizing connections and ping to their promised levels.[33]

Valorant was teased under a tentative title Project A in October 2019.[34] It was announced on March 1, 2020, with a gameplay video on YouTube called "The Round".[5][35][36] The closed beta of the game was launched on April 7, 2020.[34] For a chance to obtain a beta access key, players were required to sign up for accounts with both Riot Games and the streaming platform Twitch and watch related streams.[37] This beta ended on May 28, 2020, with the game being fully released on June 2, 2020.[38]

Valorant has been compared to Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with both games having two teams of five attempting to plant a bomb,[4] and Blizzard Entertainment's class-based shooter Overwatch, as both games have multiple classes catering to various playstyles.[44]

Austen Goslin of Polygon praised the beta of Valorant describing it as refined and "one of the most fun tactical shooters I've played".[2] On the first day of its beta launch, Valorant amassed the second most concurrent viewers for any game ever on Twitch, with 1.73 million viewers tuning in across dozens of streams. Only another title from Riot Games, League of Legends, has had more concurrent viewers, when 1.74 million watched the 2019 World Championship final.[45]

It was nominated for Best Esports Game, Best Multiplayer and Best Community Support at The Game Awards 2020.[46]

• Official website