Back in 2019, Riot Games, the developers behind the league of legends announced their first-person shooter video game and they called it Project A. That project A just came alive with the name “Valorant”.
With this title, Riot Games aims to give a toe-to-toe competition to the giant valve title, Counter-Strike: Global offensive. Riot Games haven’t announced any release date of their upcoming title, but as per the reports, this will be free to play game and will land in summers in every region of the world. Right now it is under alpha testing and very soon, the closed beta will start, if you want to register for the closed beta, click here.
For now, the beta registrations are only allowed from players located in Europe, Canada, United States, Turkey, Russia, and CIS countries. If you belong to any of these regions, you are eligible. You need to register for a Riot account and link your Riot account to a Twitch account. Then watch specific Valorant streams highlighted on Twitch to be entitled to Closed Beta access.
Valorant is a team-based first-person shooter just like CS: GO but with some new rules and a fresh style. It has operatives called Agents and each agent has its own special abilities. As all the agents have to work in a team and team should be called something, so Riot Games has decided to call the same as defenders and attackers. the game runs on the unreal engine the same as CS: GO and it also offers air acceleration which means bhopping is a thing here.
The game’s visuals, honestly for me, are combined of Overwatch, Rainbow six siege and they are just fine, not many details in the environment and no camouflaging between the player and surroundings. I will explain gameplay later in this article. Overall, this game, THE Valorant, is fun to play and has huge potential to be an e-sports title, the agents in-game gives its gameplay a huge depth without ruining a thing and its new style keeps players active and promising. However, the visuals are raw but sort of childish so I think it could create a problem for the hardcore CS gamer to take it seriously. Well, we will find out in summer.
Valorant is a 5v5 defusal team-based competitive game, with two teams called Defenders, the counter-terrorists, and the Attackers, the terrorists. Each round is of 1 minute and 40 seconds. At the starting of each round, there’s a buy phase in which one can buy the guns and utilities to use in the game. Unlike CS: GO, Valorant has an option to resell the items bought if the team decides to go Eco. The C4 of the team spawns on base alone and anyone who would like to carry may pick it later on , and in case someone forgets about it the voice over feature of game will tell the team, It also tells other important intel like the time left in round. In the buy phase, one can position himself around the maps, until the barriers opens and when it opens, it shows the start of round. The maps are very nicely designed they have narrow passages to execute fake takes. Also, there will be 4 maps at launch and some of them even have 3 bomb sites!
Talking about the guns, they are very similar to the ones we have in CS GO. These guns also look to be more balanced than we found the guns in CSGO Many of the guns offer one-shot kills if aimed at the head. The game scoreboard tells us the money that another team has. This will help the team to build strategies. The player Boosts are very much considered as nice strategies in CSGO, but here if you try to boost, you will simply slip down. Though we can do Bhop as it runs on the UNREAL ENGINE and air acceleration is possible.
Utilities here, are described here as Abilities, each agent has its own abilities, and they have a total of 4 out of which one is ultra and that needs to be charged after specific tasks, like after planting a bomb, after getting respawned, etc. An agent can only have 4 limited abilities. Abilities don’t disappear in other rounds if you have bought one until you die. So it’s a nice way to invest money. Everyone will have 5 agents to choose from and they can choose it only before the game starts. In-game changes aren’t allowed. Though one can buy other agents and skins, RIOT GAMES says it won’t affect the competitive environment as they did the same in LOL.
Servers will be of 128 tick only, unlike CSGO which has 64 and 128 ones. All the servers will be operated by Riot games which means no community servers. If you have played CS GO, you know that the community servers were a major reason for CS: GO’s success. One can create offline servers and add his friends to play. The offline mode even offers a practice map, similar to what we see in community workshops in CSGO.
The game will run at least 30 FPS on minimum specification PCs and up to 144 FPS on gaming rigs. So, it will be highly accessible. Gamers will also get the battle pass and purchasable cosmetics like sprays and player cards.
The company only confirmed the summer 2020 release plans and the exact release date will depend on the feedback received during the beta testing. So, we should know the exact release date in a few weeks.
Watch a full match of Valorant here.
