Played the first days of the competitive shooter beta, we value the reality, present and future, of the new game from the creators of League of Legends
It's only been a few days since Valorant, Riot Games' first intellectual property outside of the League of Legends universe, has landed among us. After his first presentation in petit committee at the end of January and which we witnessed, and after keeping a jealous secret of it for more than a month, Riot has been leaking information to the press and certain sectors until reaching the launch of the closed beta on last April 7. With almost two million accounts connected to Twitch waiting for the fall of an early access key, more and more people are enjoying the tactical shooter with which the Californian company aims to assault the genre hitherto dominated with an iron fist by CS: GO, Rainbow 6 and, depending on the area, CrossFire.
There are several things that have been corroborated in these few days that we have been with Valorant: the first and most important is that Riot has not reinvented the wheel nor has he claimed it with his proposal. For better and for worse, much of the expertise – or lack of it – acquired in other similar titles is easily transferred to this one. There is no difference in handling between the 10 heroes available (5 starting, 5 to unlock) when it comes to fundamental and targeted movement, so choosing one or the other is simply a matter of personal desire, equipment needs or the own abilities that we want to have. But we have also seen how the game has a certain personality, a certain appeal that has made people who have never wanted to try a title of this style been bitten by the bug. It is clear that although they are the latest to hit the market, the immense popularity of League of Legends can act as a magnet for Valorant without the need to cannibalize their own user base as TeamFight Tactics has. And the basis of his success or failure will be that he remembers many others but has certain peculiarities that make him unique in front of others.
Bullets and magic
One of the characteristics that most distinguishes the game from its competitors are the heroes and their abilities. But we must not forget that Valorant is 90% shots and, during our game sessions, we often find ourselves winning and losing rounds without having to use any of them because the main core of the game is still in our ability to target the rival quickly. Each character has a set of 4 unique abilities and generally for individual use, of which 1 is obtained free of charge at the beginning of each round, 2 are obtained with the same money with which weapons are purchased and a last one, generally higher impact, which is charged based on our performance.
The vast bulk of these skills fall into the categories of vision, vision denial, map control, or map control denial. That is why there are many skills that obscure, hinder or hinder the ability of the enemy and himself to reach a point or to have comfortable access to it, although there are others that favor the mobility of the hero in question or hinder that of the enemy. It is true that it bothers everyone to die because of a rocket launcher and lose the round because of it, but the vast majority of the times we kill and die is because someone has simply aimed better. And it is not a banal fact: despite the many videos that haunt on social networks about it, the reality of Valorant is that if you are good at shooting you will get to the top and if you are not, no.
Something that the player who comes to the genre for the first time has to get used to is high lethality. High lethality means that, generally, if someone sees us before him, we will die from very few shots. It means that if we are not precise with the mouse, we will die. It means that we are in the same conditions as the enemy in terms of life, travel speed and weapon damage. There is no armor to protect the head and 3 shots of almost any weapon to the chest or legs will suffice to knock us down. The rounds rarely reach 90 seconds and one has to get used to looking at the screen watching the action with the eyes of a partner; If our style of video game is to throw a lot of abilities, absorb a lot of damage, heal and respawn when you die, Valorant is not for us. The game is focused on having brief adrenaline kicks, little rest, a new shot and repeating the process. And both in victory and in the most bitter defeat, with the many stomps that exist due to the scarce playable base and the absence of matchmaking by level, this objective is achieved. Achieving deactivate the pump with a second of margin continues to provide a degree of satisfaction that few other things can achieve.
CSGO veterans, for example, will find many familiarities in Valorant, and the gaming economy is one of them. After each round we will get an amount of money that will depend on our performance and if we have won or lost the previous round. With that money you can acquire weapons, skills and armor. There is even a very well thought-out interface that allows us to buy weapons for a poorer partner without the need to throw them on the ground, for example. There are the classic pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, shotguns, heavy machine guns, and sniper rifles. Each of them has its own particularities, firing rates, recoil, damage (at different distances), speed to take out the sight (if there is one) … Given that when we die we lose the weapon, there are often rounds where there is no We can or want to spend and save for the next, giving rise to a strategic component that both individually and as a team we must learn to manage.
It also highlights that the game is played at various levels of height, not only at ground level. By this we do not mean that there are only high places from which we can be shot or from which to stalk the players, but that there are characters that can rise a couple of heights above the usual (which must be taken into account to those who are used to only aiming at the enemy's head) and there are also some points where they can be placed on walls or boxes to make it difficult for opponents to react. Often it is even better strategy to position yourself above than behind walls and boxes because many of the weapons enjoy surface penetration and where we think we are safe we really are not.
Riot Games has opted for a technical section that is affordable for most of the PC community to the point that the game runs on a Core 2 Duo of almost 15 years ago. It doesn't take a large team to move it to 60/120 or even 144 FPS, if we have the right monitor, and in our tests it has been stable at all times no matter what happens on screen. At the audio level, the game is also exemplary without artifices that could harm hearing an enemy approach our position. The artistic part has not been given up, with numerous details both in heroes and in all the maps to give them their own personality and attitude, but such details are always placed above the shooting area so as not to hinder the gameplay. In other words, it has been tried that the scenes or the characters, all with the same hitbox, do not interfere with the targeting ability of the enemies.
So far the structural design of the scenarios seems to us a total success; we still do not understand exactly how the rotation of the maps works (there are days that we have played 1 exclusively, other days that we have not seen it at all) but they are all very different from each other and have particularities that make them unique with respect to rest. Sometimes we will have three areas to defend or attack while at others there will be a gigantic central area with lots of hiding places to prepare an ambush. There are areas that defend themselves with snipers, others with multiple closed turns designed for hand-to-hand combat and many others for combat at medium distance. There are multiple possibilities of flanking, of surprising the rival and if we also add the abilities of our heroes, the confrontations can happen from many different angles. At the end of the game, the amount of information that the game gives us about our performance is really good and we can examine in detail where we have performed well and where we have finished behind.
One of the things clearly to improve is the social aspect of Valorant. The integration with other Riot games is very poor and although there is cross-game communication, it is not even possible to open a chat window with another person who is playing League of Legends. As Riot is an officially multi-game company, addressing this section is not a minor detail. It is more understandable to forgive the design of the store, as well as to understand the beta status of all the "accessory" aspects of the game itself: profiles of ourselves and our friends, progression of the missions, contracts of the characters, some bugs in the area of practices … The core of Valorant is fully functional, be clear, and it is the experience that you want to show. But we can not ignore that much work is pending in this section and we would like it to be given a bit of attention and not be relegated to semi-oblivion as the client of League of Legends has historically been.
A well-executed variation of a known formula
All in all, Valorant is essentially an iteration on a proven formula that works wonders. It is not surprising that it is a fun game that has a power of attraction even for people who have never tried the genre because it is well known what works and how it works. It is clear that some will continue to prefer the bet of Rainbow 6, CSGO or similar and others, instead they will see a new attraction in skills and the possibility of starting from scratch in the adventure of tactical shooter. What is clear is that the title has broken in with great force and it remains to be seen if it will be able to maintain the inertia to stay when the final version arrives in June of this year.
