Valorant is a team-based tactical shooter and first-person shooter set in the near-future. Players play as one of a set of agents, characters designed based on several countries and cultures around the world. 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 which requires charging through kills, deaths, or spike actions. Each player starts each round with a "classic" pistol and with one or more "signature ability" charge. Other weapons and ability charges can be purchased using an in game economic system which 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 sidearms, submachine guns, shotguns, machine guns, assault rifles and sniper rifles. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons such as the "Spectre," "Odin," and "Vandal" have recoil patterns which have to be controlled by the player in order to be able to shoot accurately.
Standard
In the standard mode, the match is played as best of 25 - first team to win 13 rounds wins the match. The attacking team has a bomb-type device called the Spike, which they must deliver to a specified location and activate. If the attacking team successfully protects the activated Spike for a set time, it detonates and they receive a point. If the defending team is able to deactivate the spike, or the 100-second round timer expires without the attacking team activating the spike, the defending team receives a point. If all the members of a team are eliminated before the spike is activated, or if all members of the defending team are eliminated after the spike is activated, the opposing team earns a point.
In the Spike Rush mode, the match is played as best of 7 rounds - the first team to win 4 rounds wins the match. Players begin the round with all abilities fully charged except their ultimate, which charges twice as fast as in standard games. All players on the attacking team carry a spike, but only one spike may be activated per round. Guns are randomized and every player begins with the same gun. Ultimate point orbs present in the standard game are not present, but sometimes a power-up orb will appear in their place.
Competitive
Competitive matches are the same as standard matches with the addition of a win-based ranking system which assigns a rank to each player after 5 games are played. In July 2020, Riot introduced a "win by two" condition for competitive matches, where instead of playing a single sudden death round at 12-12, teams will alternate playing rounds on attack and defense in overtime until a team claims victory by securing a two match lead. Each overtime round gives players the same amount of money to purchase guns and abilities, as well as approximately half of their ultimate ability charge. After each group of two rounds, players may vote to end the game in a draw, requiring 6 players after the first set, 3 after the second, and thereafter only 1 player to agree to a draw.
Development
Valorant was developed and published by Riot Games, who have previously developed League of Legends. Development started in 2014, within their research and development division. Joe Ziegler, Valorant game director, is credited with the initial idea of Valorant while formulating potential games with other Riot developers. David Nottingham is the creative director for Valorant. Trevor Romleski, former League of Legends designer and Salvatore Garozzo, former professional player and map designer of are game designers for Valorant. Moby Francke, former Valve developer, who has been art and character designer for Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, is the art director. Valorant was built using Unreal Engine 4, which allowed the development team to focus on gameplay and optimizations. 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. They also optimized server performance by disabling character animations in non-combat situations and removing unnecessary evaluations in the hit registration process. 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. 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. Due to the increase in internet traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, Riot has had trouble optimizing connections and ping to their promised levels.
Release
Valorant was teased under a tentative title Project A in October 2019. It was announced on March 1, 2020, with a gameplay video on YouTube called "The Round". The closed beta of the game was launched on April 7, 2020. 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. This beta ended on May 28, 2020, with the game being fully released on June 2, 2020.
Reception
Valorant has been compared to Valve's , with both games having two teams of five attempting to plant a bomb, and Blizzard's class-based shooter Overwatch. Austen Goslin of Polygon praised the beta of Valorant describing it as refined and "one of the most fun tactical shooters I've played". 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.
Anti-cheat software controversy
The game has been criticized for its anti-cheat software, Vanguard, as it was revealed to run on a kernel driver, which allows access to the computer system. OSNews expressed concern that Riot Games and its owner, Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent, could spy on players and that the kernel driver could be potentially exploited by third parties. However, Riot Games stated that the driver does not send any information back to them, and launched a bug bounty program to offer rewards for reports that demonstrate vulnerabilities with the software.
