Valorant
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From CSGO to Valorant: What players must know about the switch
M Alzamora
Valorant and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have a fair amount in common, but there are some pretty big differences between Valve’s classic shooter and Riot Games’ entry into the genre. Here are some of the biggest differences between the granddaddy of competitive shooters and Riot’s addicting entry. In Counter-Strike, corner camping is almost impossible. The corners in Valve’s FPS are very shallow, meaning that as long as the player peeks them …
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Learn from Dafran how to do this OP footsteps trick in Valorant
Olivia Richman
Former Overwatch League pro Daniel “Dafran” Francesca has been discovering a lot of tricks and techniques while playing Valorant. Recently, Dafran decided to play around with foosteps, a big part of Valorant’s gameplay. He turned the master volume up to show his followers something possibly game-breaking he’d discovered. Working with the enemy team in chat, Dafran instructed them to make their way through Split’s B site. With no gunshots, Dafran …
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How to get ranked in Valorant: All ranks revealed
M Alzamora
Valorant’s recent patch came with a whole host of bug fixes and quality of life improvements, but the biggest news out of the recent patch is the addition of a ranked mode to Riot Games’ new first-person shooter. There are only a few requirements before players can be assigned a rank, and most who have been playing the open beta should already meet the criteria to start their placement games. …
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Dr Disrespect mocks summit, xQc for caring about Valorant on Twitch
Olivia Richman
Big names in the streaming community have been getting fed up with the Valorant category on Twitch. In partnership with Twitch, Riot Games has been offering closed beta access to Valorant via drops, earned by watching streamers with “drops enabled” on their channel. This was seen as an innovative way to provide access to a closed beta at first, but many content creators now seem tired of the concept. One …
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DazeD returns to Twitch to play Valorant, nails huge ace clutch
M Alzamora
After almost three years away from the platform, Sam “DaZeD” Marine returned to Twitch last night to try his hand at Riot Games’ new shooter, Valorant. Once considered one of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s best in-game leaders, DaZeD stepped back from Counter-Strike and livestreaming in 2017. His appearnce on stream was a surprise to many as the former pro played several matches of Valorant with Team Liquid’s Jake “Stewie2k” Yip and …
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Riot paying hackers $100,000 to find ways to cheat in Valorant
Olivia Richman
Riot will be rewarding anyone who finds vulnerabilities in Valorant’s anti-cheat software, Vanguard. For the past six years, the League of Legends developer has been running a Bug Bounty program on HackerOne, where they’ve paid out over $2 million in bounties to players who find bugs, glitches, and anything else that undermines the security and privacy of players. Payouts were awarded based on the severity of the breach, with a …
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CSGO pro wrongfully banned from Valorant after plugging phone into PC
Olivia Richman
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pro Oscar “Mixwell” Cañellas was wrongfully kicked out of Valorant for plugging his phone into his PC. That seemingly innocent action got Mixwell immediately blocked from Riot’s new FPS title. Mixwell had just won a round when he went to charge his phone by connecting it to his phone. Apparently, the game’s anti-cheat system interpreted the new device as Mixwell attempting to do something sneaky and banned …
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Valorant developers say Split ropes are fine as players complain
Olivia Richman
Ranked mode is coming to Valorant and closed beta participants are panicking about the game’s potential exploits. One of the most recent movement tricks in the game is the use of ropes on Split. There are a few ropes throughout the map that players can hook onto in order to reach high ground more rapidly. While attached to the ropes, players found out they could still fire their weapons. Because …
Riot Games has long looked to expand its footprint beyond the success of popular MOBA League of Legends, and one of its biggest successes to date in this regard is the tactical shooter, Valorant. Blending traditional first-person shooter elements with unique and flashy hero abilities, Valorant seeks to combine the best attributes of tactical shooters and hero shooters into one cohesive experience.
Based on player feedback, the game has largely succeeded in accomplishing those aims. It’s not an easy balance, and it’s one that is arguably still tenuous, but Riot Games seems to be doing as good a job of it as most fans have hoped for.
What type of game is Valorant?
Valorant is a first-person shooter that represents a unique blend of the tactical shooter and hero shooter subgenres. There are some games that represent similar gameplay elements, but not many that offer the exact experience that Valorant puts forward to players.
The tactical shooter genre is often considered to have been defined by the release of the original Counter-Strike, a multiplayer mod for famed single-player PC title Half-Life that later became a standalone game of its own. While most multiplayer FPS games to that point emphasized prolonged battles between opposing players zipping around the game at high speeds, Counter-Strike slowed things down significantly and made players much more susceptible to each other’s firepower, requiring players to take a more tactical approach to play.
That slower and more tactical approach, combined with the lightning-quick nature of action when it does occur, proved reliably popular. That popularity can still be seen today with the ongoing success enjoyed by the Counter-Strike franchise, and it’s this gameplay type that represents the core of Valorant. It’s no accident that former Counter-Strike developers were drafted by Riot Games to help create Valorant during the game’s formative stages.
What differentiates Valorant from CS and other tactical shooters it that each of the game’s characters, called agents, wield a number of unique abilities. Some are typical for tactical shooters, like flashbangs and smokes, while others are wildly different, such as an ability that transports two players to an isolated dueling arena for its duration.
These agent abilities are more reminiscent of hero shooters, a subgenre that arguably got its start with the Team Fortress games but has best been popularized by Blizzard title Overwatch. The abilities, combind with the tactical considerations that are at the core of Valorant, separate it from most any other FPS experience available for play.
How does Valorant esports work?
Like many other popular competitive shooters, Valorant does have a thriving esports scene. That scene is differentiated by the way it’s run and controlled by developer and publisher Riot Games. Riot uses a model based on the success of its League of Legends esports scene, which sees the globe’s competitive players and team’s separated by region. These regions play out their own competitions in their sections of the world before coming together at regular intervals for international tournaments featuring the best teams from each individual region.
While League of Legends once boasted a variety of regions and regional types, Riot sought to simplify that model when setting up esports for Valorant. The game has only a handful of major regions, and these regions are held as largely equitable, each sending their best teams to international events leading up to the year-end VALORANT Champions event.
