Valorant

Valorant is a team-based tactical shooter and first-person shooter set in the near-future.[1][2][3][4] Players assume the control of agents, characters who come from a plethora of countries and cultures around the world.[4] In the main game mode, players join either the attacking or defending team with each team having five players on it. Agents have unique abilities and use an economic system to purchase their abilities and weapons. The game has an assortment of weapons including sidearms, submachine guns, shotguns, machine guns, assault rifles and sniper rifles.[5][6] Automatic weapons such as the "Spectre" and "Odin" have recoil patterns which have to be controlled by the player in order to be able to shoot accurately.[6]

In the standard game mode, the match is played over 24 rounds, and the first team to win 13 rounds wins the match. The attacking team has a bomb-type device called the Spike, which they need to plant on a site. If the attacking team successfully protects the Spike and it detonates, they get a point. If the defending team successfully defuses the Spike, or the 100-second round timer expires, the defending team gets a point. If all the members of a team are eliminated, the opposing team earns a point. After twelve rounds, the attacking team switches to the defending team and vice versa. If a match ends with a 12-12 score, a sudden death round is added (with no side switching taking place).[2][7][4]

In the Spike Rush mode, the match is played over 7 rounds, so the first team to win 4 rounds wins the match. To further reduce the gameplay's length, loadouts are random every round and every attacking player carries the spike that they can plant at any site.

Valorant was developed and published by Riot Games, who have previously developed League of Legends.[8][4] Development started in 2014, within their research and development division.[1] Joe Ziegler, Valorant's game director, is credited with the initial idea of Valorant while formulating potential games with other Riot developers.[1] David Nottingham is the creative director for Valorant.[1] Trevor Romleski, former League of Legends's designer and Salvatore Garozzo, former professional player and map designer of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are game designers for Valorant.[9] Moby Francke, former Valve developer, who has been art and character designer for Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, is the art director.[10][11]

Valorant was built using Unreal Engine 4, which allowed the development team to focus on gameplay and optimizations.[12][13] In order to reach 30 frames per second on minimum hardware requirements, its engineering team, led by Marcus Reid, who previously worked on Gears of War 4, had to make several modifications to the engine, such as editing the renderer using the engine's mobile rendering path as base.[12] They also optimized server performance by disabling character animations in non-combat situations and removing unnecessary evaluations in the hit registration proccess.[12]

Valorant was first teased under a tentative title Project A in October 2019.[14] It was officially announced on March 1, 2020, with a gameplay video on YouTube called "The Round".[4][15][16] The closed beta of the game was launched on April 7, 2020.[14] 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.[17] This beta ended on May 28, 2020, with the game being fully released on June 2, 2020.[18]

Valorant has been compared to Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with both games having two teams of five attempting to plant a bomb,[3] and Blizzard's class-based shooter Overwatch.[20]

Austen Goslin of Polygon praised the beta of Valorant describing it as refined and "one of the most fun tactical shooters I've played".[1] On the first day of its beta launch, Valorant amassed the second most concurrent viewers for any game ever on Twitch, with 1.7 million viewers tuning in across dozens of streams. Only another game from Riot Games, League of Legends, has seen more viewers - when 1.73 million watched the 2019 World Championship final.[21]

• Official website