Valorant Game [NEW]
Valorant is a free-to-play first-person tactical hero shooter developed and published by Riot Games, for Windows.[2] Teased under the codename Project A in October 2019, the game began a closed beta period with limited access on April 7, 2020, followed by a release on June 2, 2020. The development of the game started in 2014. Valorant takes inspiration from the Counter-Strike series of tactical shooters, borrowing several mechanics such as the buy menu, spray patterns, and inaccuracy while moving.
valorant game
Valorant is a team-based first-person tactical hero shooter set in the near future.[3][4][5][6] Players play as one of a set of Agents, characters based on several countries and cultures around the world.[6] 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 that requires charging through kills, deaths, orbs, or objectives. Every player starts each round with a "classic" pistol and one or more "signature ability" charges.[4] Other weapons and ability charges can be purchased using an in-game economic system that awards money based on the outcome of the previous round, any kills the player is responsible for, and any objectives completed. The game has an assortment of weapons including secondary guns like sidearms and primary guns like submachine guns, shotguns, machine guns, assault rifles and sniper rifles.[7][8] There are automatic and semi-automatic weapons that each have a unique shooting pattern that has to be controlled by the player to be able to shoot accurately.[8] It currently offers 20 agents to choose from.[2][9] They are Brimstone, Viper, Omen, Cypher, Sova, Sage, Phoenix, Jett, Raze, Breach, Reyna, Killjoy, Skye, Yoru, Astra, KAY/O, Chamber, Neon, Fade, Harbor, and Gekko. The player will get 5 unlocked agents when they create their account, (Brimstone, Sova, Sage, Phoenix and Jett) and will have to unlock the rest of the agents by activating that agent's contract.[clarification needed]
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 in every round and every player begins with the same gun. Ultimate point orbs in the standard game are present, as well as multiple different power-up orbs.[12]
Swiftplay matches are simply a shortened version of the Unrated game mode. 10 players are split into 2 teams, attackers and defenders. Attackers must plant the spike while the Defenders must stop them. What differs Swiftplay to Unrated is that it is best to 9 rounds - the first team to win 5 rounds wins the match. On round 4, the team's players switch, as they would do in round 7 in the Unrated game mode. The game's currency system has no changes from Unrated. Swiftplay is meant as a quick game mode, averaging around 15 minutes per game, as opposed to around 40 minutes for Unrated.
Competitive matches are the same as unranked matches with the addition of a win-based ranking system that assigns a rank to each player after 5 games are played. Players are required to reach level 20 before playing this mode.[13] 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. The competitive ranking system ranges from Iron to Radiant. Every rank except for Radiant has 3 tiers.[14] Radiant is reserved for the top 500 players of a region, and both Immortal and Radiant have a number associated to their rank allowing players to have a metric in which they can compare how they rank up to others at their level.[15]
Premier is a 5v5 gamemode that allows players a path-to-pro competitive game mode that is aimed towards players that wish to be a professional player. Premier is currently in alpha testing in Brazil. Players will need to create a team of five to compete against other teams in divisions. Each season will last a few weeks and the top teams will be invited to compete in the Division Championship. This gamemode will include a pick-and-ban system for maps unlike all the other gamemodes where the players have to play the map selected by the system.[16]
The Escalation gamemode was introduced on February 17, 2021[19] and is similar to the "gungame" concept found in Counter-Strike and Call of Duty: Black Ops, though it is team-based rather than free-for-all with 5 players on each team. The game will pick a random selection of 12 weapons to move through. As with other gungame versions, a team needs to get a certain number of kills to advance to the next weapon and the weapons get progressively worse as the team moves through them.[20] There are two winning conditions, if one team successfully goes through all 12 levels, or if one team is on a higher level than the opposing team within 10 minutes. Just like Deathmatch, players spawn in as a random agent, unable to use abilities, as the gamemode is set for pure gun fights. Though, abilities like Sova's shock darts, Raze's boom bot, and rocket launcher, are abilities that everyone gets to use as a weapon. After a kill, green health packs drop, which replenishes the player's health, armor, and ammo to its maximum. The gamemode also has auto respawns on, respawning players in random locations around the map.[21]
The Replication gamemode went live on May 11, 2021.[22] During the agent select, players vote on which agent they would want to play as. At the end of the time, or after everyone has voted, the game randomly selects one of the player's votes. The entire team will then play as that agent, even if one of the players has not unlocked that agent. It is a best of nine, with the players switching sides after the fourth round. Players can buy guns and shields with a pre-set number of credits. Abilities are pre-bought. Weapons and shields are reset every round.[23]
Snowball Fight is a limited-time gamemode that was released on December 15, 2020, and is only available during Christmas season.[24] It is a Team Deathmatch game mode, with 50 kills to win. Abilities are not allowed to be used, and players spawn in as a random agent. The only weapon available is the snowball launcher, which is an instant kill, but slow, and uses a projectile-based arc. There is infinite ammo. Throughout the game a "portal" will spawn, delivering gifts, which each contain a random power up.[25]
There are a large variety of playable agents available in the game. Agents are divided into 4 roles: Duelists, Sentinels, Initiators, and Controllers. Each agent has a different role which indicates how the agent is usually played.
The store is composed of three sections: Featured, Offers, and Night Market. In all three sections, players can buy weapon skins using Valorant Points that change the appearance of their weapon in-game. Valorant Points (VP) is an in-game currency that can only be purchased with real currency within the game client.[29]
Night Market is a periodic store that drops at random times in each Act of the game. The Night Market includes 6 random weapon skins at randomly discounted prices which is unique to every player. Players only receive one set of offers and the offer will last until the Night Market ends.
Valorant was developed and published by Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends.[30][6] Development started in 2014, within their research and development division.[3] Joe Ziegler, Valorant's game director, is credited with the initial idea of Valorant while formulating potential games with other Riot developers.[3] David Nottingham is the creative director for Valorant.[3] Trevor Romleski, former League of Legends's designer and Salvatore Garozzo, former professional player and map designer for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are game designers for Valorant.[31] Moby Francke, former Valve developer, who has been art and character designer for Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, is the art director.[32][33]
Valorant was developed with two main focuses: making tactical shooters and e-sports more accessible to new players, and creating a game that would attract a large competitive scene, while solving many of the points of criticism voiced by professional players from games in the genre.[34][35][36] Games aimed at large, active communities and player bases, typically free-to-play games like Fortnite or Riot's own League of Legends, tend to put an emphasis on a wider array of system performance improvements and game stability rather than newer technologies or graphics as a way of making sure they're as accessible as possible. In interviews leading up to the game's launch, game director Joe Ziegler and producer Anna Donlon said that Valorant was made for people playing their first tactical shooter just as much as it was for professional players, and that accessibility of the game was a large priority.[35]
Riot chose to develop Valorant using Unreal Engine 4, which the development team said would allow it to focus on gameplay and optimizations rather than spending time on core systems.[37][38] To meet the goal of a lower performance barrier so more people could play Valorant, the team set notably low minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the game. To reach 30 frames per second on these small requirements, the game's engineering team, led by Marcus Reid, who previously worked on Gears of War 4, had to make several modifications to the engine. These modifications included editing the renderer using the engine's mobile rendering path as base, or reworking the game's lighting systems to fit the static lighting that tactical shooters often require, as to not interfere with gameplay.[37] Unreal's modern underpinnings also helped to solve many of the issues that Riot set out to solve from other games in the genre, and additional modifications helped to meet the game's other goal of creating a suitable competitive environment, including optimizing server performance by disabling character animations in non-combat situations and removing unnecessary evaluations in the hit registration process.[39][35][37] 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.[40] To accomplish this, Riot promised 128-tick 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.[40] Due to the increase in internet traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, Riot has had trouble optimizing connections and ping to their promised levels.[41] 041b061a72