KNOWYOUR AGENTS Theirbackstoriesarestilla mystery,butwe
knowwhattoexpectfromtheseagentswhenthegunscomeoutCYPHER
A defensiveagent,
Cyphercanthrow
tripminesandstick
a cameraonwallsto
keepwatch.JETT
Therareagentwith
a verticalleaping
ability.Jettcanget
airborneandhurl
knivesforquickkills.VIPER
Viper’s poison
clouds are zoning
tools, blinding
enemies, herding
them into fire.went into pre-production, and they
vetted every design choice for its
potential hackability. It’s server-
authoritative, so a player’s client can’t
disrupt a match with a cheat saying
“I’m invincible”. But many cheats are
more sophisticated than that.
Anti-cheat lead Paul Chamberlain
gave a basic example: your crosshair
doesn’t turn red in Valorant when
you aim at an enemy, because a hack
could read that pixel and instantly
pull the trigger, guaranteeing a hit.
Even what it feels like to fire a gun
in Valorant was influenced by the
anti-cheat team. “When we were
talking about how recoil for guns
should work, we spent a lot of time
discussing how much to trust the
client. Because if you trust the client,
then you can write a cheat that
ignores recoil,” Chamberlain says.
Six: Siege, will be drawn to a game
that stonewalls cheaters and uses the
fastest servers in gaming. Its bona
fides are undeniable.
But is that really enough to make
people want to play it?
SHOTS FIRED
Valorant is going up against games
thatalreadyhavemillionsofplayers.
Maybeenoughofthemare“However, if you don’t trust the client, it becomes this
prediction problem, where you might look like you’ve
shot a bullet accurately on your computer, but the server
disagrees, and tries to find a balance. For the most part,
we’ve landed on the very secure end of the spectrum, but
there’s always a trade off.”
Fourth ace: a particular dedication to mitigating
peeker’s advantage, an eternal challenge in competitive
shooters. Say you’re standing next to a wall in CS:GO, and
there’s an opponent just around the corner. If you strafe
out, just for a moment, you can see where your opponent
is before they have a chance to react – by the time your
movement is sent to the server, the server sends it to their
client, they input a command, it goes back to the server
and then back to your client, you’re already safe behind
cover. And if you round the corner guns blazing, you’ll
always have an advantage, as your opponent’s window of
opportunity to react is smaller.
Straily says the team has gotten that window down to
60 milliseconds, which could affect Valorant more deeply
than you might think. “It’s simply more strategic if you
have to think about going around a corner by using a
utility or an ability from one of your characters.
“You have to think more critically, and we want it to be
more of a thinking man’s game.”
Valorant’s developers want you to trust, absolutely, that
when you died, there was no hanky panky. That when you
fired a bullet at someone’s head, the hitbox was exacting,
and lag didn’t rob you of your headshot. And they seem to
be banking on the idea that competitive shooter players,
people who love games like Counter-Strike and Rainbow
ABOVE: Fire from the
hip, and you’re
definitely not hitting
that shot.mighttrytoemploy.Howdowe
workagainstthat?’”
“There’s no wall in our workspace
that says ‘demolish CS:GO’ or ‘take
half of Overwatch’s players’,” adds
executive producer Anna Donlon.
“Those aren’t our success criteria. I
think there are a lot of players out
there who haven’t found their
shooter of choice yet. Or they find
one they like for a while and bounce
off of it. Maybe we’re for them. We’re
definitely not going to be for
everybody. We know that for sure.”
Whoever Valorant’s for, I think at
least one thing’s safe to say: their ping
is going to be great.disgruntled by network issues or simply bored of the same
old, same old, and that’ll give Valorant a healthy audience.
But it’s still surprising that the game hews so closely to
what’s been done before, with its big draws just being
fairness and reliability. Will that really work on players
who are, right at this moment, content to shoot it out on
de_dust2 for the 30,000th time?
Well, League of Legends made that bet by adapting a
Warcraft III mod, and it became the biggest game in the
world. So maybe Riot knows what it’s doing.
Like Joe Ziegler says, getting better at tactical shooters- learning the right defensive rotations, controlling recoil
just a hair more accurately – is traditionally a game of
inches. Maybe iterating on their design is, too.
“We’re really looking at how you re-fix the puzzle with
all these characters,” Ziegler says. “How’s every game
completely different? Instead of walking in and going
‘they’re guaranteed to have three smokes and two
molotovs in this location’. Now it’s like ‘they have this
set of characters, these are the sets of strategies they
SOVA
Sova’s ult is a blast:
he fires magic
arrows through
walls clear across
the map.PHOENIX
Phoenix is all about
the fire. His
flashbang skill can
be curved around
corners.Va lo ra nt
FEATURE