One of the most popular free-to-play shooters on the PC is now officially available for consoles. After a brief open beta period that began in late July, Riot Games has officially launched Valorant for Microsoft"s Xbox Series X and S consoles, along with Sony"s PlayStation 5 consoles.
In a post on the Xbox Wire site, Riot Games says that now that Valorant is out of the testing stage for consoles, those gamers can expect regular updates for the title:
We put out patches every two weeks across all platforms to address things like game balance, bug fixes, or QoL improvements. And a few times per year, we release larger updates to an Agent’s entire kit when there’s an opportunity to bolster or tamp down their strength. These kinds of updates typically aren’t needed very often and will only be implemented at a time that won’t affect active Pro play schedules.
Riot Games has already released four patches for the console versions of Valorant since the limited beta test of the game began in June. The developer plans to update the game post-launch on consoles that may be unique to that platform, indicating that balance changes may not be the same on the PC and console versions.
Riot has decided that Valorant will not have cross-play support for console ports and the PC version, due to the different ways of playing for those platforms. However, Xbox and PlayStation players will be able to compete against each other online. There will also be cross-progression across all of the game"s versions for both cosmetic item purchases and the game"s Battle Passes.
While the game is free to play on Xbox consoles, members of Microsoft"s Xbox Game Pass service can go ahead and automatically unlock all of Valorant"s agents for a nice extra benefit for those players.