Last year in October, Riot Games announced a horde of new projects the studio is working on, including multiple games and even an animated series. Following several new leaks over the past week, today, Riot Games officially unveiled Valorant, the first-person shooter coming to PC that previously carried the code name Project A. See some pre-alpha gameplay footage above.
As previously announced, the game is a competitive shooter that is set apart from the League universe unlike the other projects Riot is working on. The five versus five competitive title will
pick the winning team based on a best of 24 round format, with the attackers trying to plant a bomb while the defenders are tasked with stopping it.
Players will be handling both conventional firearms as well as unique character-specific abilities - described as hypernatural powers. These range from base powers that essentially enable double jumps and throwing fireballs, to ultimates that provide an orbital strike or a revive. Some of these abilities will need to be bought at the start of a round, similar to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive"s economy, but others will be free or will need to be acquired by performing well in rounds.
Riot says that Valorant will have 128-tick dedicated servers spread globally to offer an optimal experience to players around the world, also adding that good netcode and anti-cheat measures are a major focus. The game is being built with older systems in mind too, with Riot promising at least 30 frames per second on computers dating back a decade even. Modern gaming PCs should be able to run the game at high frame rates easily.
Valorant is slated to release sometime in summer 2020 and will be free-to-play at launch. There should be a beta kicking off before the official release though.