All the details of the Project A from the creators of League of Legends, which sees the light for the first time.
At the end of January this year we had the opportunity to visit the headquarters of Riot Games in California, invited by the company itself on the occasion of attending the presentation of its new first-person shooter and tactical approach: Valorant. That “Project A” that we saw in the tenth anniversary video is much more advanced than some predicted and will be ready to leave, in principle, in the summer of this same 2020 and with a beta phase presumably very soon. It is the first great intellectual property of Riot that is born outside the universe of League of Legends and, after Legends of Runeterra, the second trick to diversify the entertainment bet beyond the MOBA that has taken them to where they are today. And although at this point it is very difficult to predict the success that a product can have in the future, in view of our experience there and the level of investment of the company in Valorant in both cash and infrastructure, it is very possible that the game hits The market like a pylon hammer.
There was some nervousness during the presentation for the international press of the game, undisputed in the case of quite a few staff members and undisputed in the case of Anna Donlon, executive producer of Valorant. Even having met with the release of powerful games like Call of Duty Black Ops I & II, it was clear that it was not just another demonstration: it was Riot teaching the world his intentions of wanting a chair and cutlery on the cake table that right now Heavy weights are distributed as CounterStrike GO, Crossfire and Rainbow Six, being the first two of the games that raised the most money during 2019 (and also being League of Legends another one, by the way).
It was Riot showing how much meat has been put in the grill to make a hole there, knowing that anything that goes by the name of the company and by its own dimension, will have a greater impact than if it came out of nowhere or from almost any other study. With more than 150 people in full dedication and after almost 3 years at full speed we witnessed an honestly very hopeful result: the hours we were playing Valorant went very quickly and we had a lot of fun, this being the almost unanimous opinion of all that we were there regardless of their country of origin. And that includes both the very veteran tactical shooters and those less accustomed to the genre.
Competitive tactical shooter first
Valorant is a shooting game with a high tactical approach and that adds Agents as a novelty, all of them with particular abilities (more on this later), but the game was not always thought of as such. "From the beginning we wanted to create another competitive game on the sidelines of League of Legends, but the tactical shooter was not our first choice," Trevor Romleski tells us; Trevor, who had previously participated in the design of some LoL characters, is the chief designer of Valorant and the main responsible for the player having a good time playing. "My main objective is that the game is fun and if in the end it is not … it is probably largely my fault," he adds without hesitation. Trevor dispatches questions and interviews with a peace of mind and security that we do not find in anyone else during our stay there, very aware of the product at hand but still being cautious: “a third or even a fifth of the scope we have achieved with League could be considered a massive success, but the most important thing is that we don't want to deviate from the most fundamental aspect of Valorant. ” And what is the fundamental aspect of Valorant? The shots.
Valorant is played the best of 24 rounds of 100 seconds per round in which two teams of 5 players attack or defend a map. The attackers must eliminate the rival team or plant and detonate a bomb at one of the points determined for it, while the defenders must bring down the rival team and / or deactivate the bomb in the event that it has been placed. The game is fast, intense and with a high lethality rate: very few shots in the body are enough to fall dead without respawn, the shots in the head of a sniper rifle kill directly regardless of the armor and usually the meetings are resolved from very fleeting way and forgive very few mistakes. Despite the impressions that some videos can give, the core of the title is 90% shots and there were many rounds we won (and lost) without using anything other than our weapons.
The most visible factor that however distinguishes Valorant from its competitors is clearly that of the Agents. Of the 10 characters that we know are available we could try a total of 8 and although they all share the same hitbox (so as not to create differences in the competitive aspect), each one enjoys his own visual style, his personality and his abilities. Each Agent has 3 normal abilities that can be acquired with money and a special ability that is charged according to our combat performance and collecting a kind of orbs placed during the map. It is possible that throughout a full game of many rounds we hardly use this special skill more than a few times and although they are important they do not go above our targeted expertise. Or in the words of Romleski, "(the skills) are a special challenge when it comes to design and they are certainly among the 3 most important things in the game, but having the best fundamentals of a shooter is something much more crucial."
As the rounds go by we make money and we have to decide what we are going to invest in; Depending on our performance we will have more or less capital to buy skills or weapons. Since this is a team game (we can even leave money to a partner to spend), the strategy has an important factor in the final development of a game: there will be savings rounds, strong investment rounds and mixed rounds. They are the first notes in the macro of a game that is yet to come out and that we saw as veterans of the League of Legends scene as David "Phreak" Turley already had quite outlined. Phreak, with whom we shared the first official victory of the international press in the history of the game, confirmed the importance of the strategy within Valorant when deciding which and when to buy any of the 17 possible weapons (5 guns, 2 SMG , 2 shotguns, 4 assault rifles, 2 machine guns and 2 sniper rifles). But at the moment of truth all that matters little if the game is not handled well or has technical problems.
And the reality is that the gaming experience was unbeatable. Obviously we were in the PC bang of Riot which is a controlled environment, but at all times we had the feeling of being before a game finished and polished. The handling was smooth, the setting very intuitive and the keyboard and mouse sensations were ideal for veterans and newbies. With the knife it goes faster and the default sprint character until we make it walk and in this way it does not appear in the always present minimap, the weapons have “iron sights” and the recoil of each one is quite noticeable to avoid the “ spray and pray ”… Even details that are there but not seen, as the decoration of each stage always begins above the field of fire, to prevent the characters from camouflaging in the environment. A whole series of characteristics, many of them invisible, aimed at trying to offer an environment of fair competition from day one. With regard to the visible: it has opted for a less realistic style than it would be CSGO or R6 but without becoming cartoon as Team Fortress, with an engine that runs under a modification of Unreal Engine 4 and very generous with the minimum hardware specifications so that most equipment can move it. With a fourth generation I5 and a 1050ti 144 fps or more are guaranteed.
One of the things that caught our attention was the emphasis that Riot put on the technical section of the game; To get an accurate idea of this, this topic had more time to dedicate during the presentation than maps, IP creation and even Agents. Riot, through its Riot Direct system, has ensured that a minimum of 70% of Valorant players will do so with a ping of 35 milliseconds or less to minimize the so-called “peeker's advantage”, the short but important advantage that the player has that looks out the corner in front of the player who expects someone to look out. Since we play League of Legends with 44 ms, we are really curious to know how it will be done with Valorant. But the argumentation of the ping was only the tip of the iceberg: 128 free tic rate servers (a small dart to CSGO) and a rather ingenious anti-cheat system whose technical details, although interesting, have better place in another type of article (fog of war to fight the wallhack, exclusive dependence on the servers, execution of processes in the highest priority of the processors, etc.). The ultimate goal is obviously to create the best possible competitive experience, something that cheaters are responsible for destroying too often and that the team of Paul Chamberlain, software engineer at Riot, will be responsible for fighting and whose implementation began even before development of the game.
“We never intentionally wanted to make a hardcore title, but we always wanted competitiveness to be part of the core of the game. Once we have launched it and everything is rolling it is possible that we explore some more relaxed game mode, but it will not be that way for now, ”Trevor told us about the audience they want to direct the Valorant to. And that was the feeling exactly the feeling we got after the two afternoons we were playing; There was laughter and good vibes but a healthy competition environment was quickly created. The games rose in quality as the players knew the two maps we could try, Bind and Haven, very different from each other. Salvatore Garozzo explained it this way: “we prefer to have few maps but very worked. We are aware that players will spend many and many hours in them and we want them to feel that they are in a unique, balanced environment and that it offers many possibilities. ” Salvatore, with his experience as a former CounterStrike player and having designed maps like "Cache," is clear: "Sometimes, less is better."
Bind is a map with two defense points and no central zone, but it incorporates a teleporter that operates in only one direction to facilitate the transitions of the equipment. It is something that we were fit to adjust to, especially the fact that skills can be launched through such teleportation, but we found it an interesting idea. Haven is a map with 3 attack zones but the central zone is almost a map in itself and the territory to defend itself is huge, with multiple flanking possibilities but with plenty of space to repel the attackers very close to their exit point. We found the design of both scenarios great and with multiple variants; We were testing different approaches with our team and it seemed that we did not get the same result in any, because the combination of weapons and skills made each round very different from the previous one.
Each Agent has a skill that is filled free after each round. These skills are usually single-use and can be a dash in the case of Jett, a ping that reveals close targets in the case of Sova or a camera that gives vision if you are Cypher. The vast majority of skills in the game are purely useful and not harmful, in the style of what grenades do in CounterStrike. Some obstruct vision, Sage can put an Overwatch Mei-style wall to block an entrance, others slow enemies, Omen teleports a short distance to flank or flee from his rivals and Brimstone can give more speed to his allies. It is true that there are some damage abilities, such as pomegranates, but generally everything is used to create control zones rather than to kill enemies. Since these skills cost money and are single use, players and teams will have to know how to find a balance on what to invest resources.
What does not cost money but it takes several rounds generally to activate are the ultimate skills; Here we find the orbital attack that literally cancels an area for several seconds, the resurrection of a dejected character, the possibility of revealing the location of the enemies from the body of an opponent, being able to absorb any amount of damage and return to the place from where we started the skill … These are important moments that are used to decide a specific round and some, such as the launch of Jett knives or the ability to shoot 3 times through the entire map regardless of obstacles (but without having to see through the walls) we found devastating. In general, all of them maintained a high level of thematic coherence with the characters to whom they were assigned (in Viper it is all poison, in Cypher everything revolves around the hacking) and although it is difficult to say so soon, it is very possible that what we thought At first they were an advantage too big for the player in reality, in a competitive environment, be the least used. All this, it is necessary to insist, within the fact that 90% of the game is still our skill to aim and shoot. But it does not hurt that we give importance to the work that has been done with the Agents.
Precisely this fact told us John Goscicki and David Nottingham, responsible for the characters and the development of IP from the creative point of view. "All Agents have to be designed according to the theme, the lore and the new intellectual property that we are building," John told us. Both seemed anxious to be able to tell which were the plans for the future of Valorant at narrative level but they knew well that it was not the moment. “We are prepared to tell stories through dedicated pages, CGI, etc. but at the moment everything is in the air and I don't want to anticipate anything, ”said David as he turned his head in the direction of the person in charge of relations with the press of our country, Maye Mac-Swiney, who carefully monitored the conversation in silence.
And it is that Riot does not want to make the same mistake that plagued the beginnings of League of Legends, where the will to take the game forward left orphan to the game of almost everything that surrounds a launch of this type, including merchandising. It was another era and of course a different company. "We are convinced that players will want to know more about the world around Valorant and its characters but the first and most important thing is to have fun by pressing buttons," concludes Goscicki. And we had a lot of fun pressing those buttons. "We have been here for a long time," says Trevor. He wouldn't miss us.
