A closed alpha of Valorant certainly happened throughout the weekend. Riot will no doubt want to expand on the number of testers so a closed beta with a much wider audience could already be in the making.
Valorant is scheduled to release this summer and the title enjoys quite a lot of popularity. The only 100% guaranteed source for news regarding the title remains Riot Games and the Valorant Twitter account. Lately, a lot of fans speculated that there’s a closed-door Valorant event, exclusively for pro players and streamers who were invited. Several streamers gave a couple of hints that there was something planned for Friday, March 27, but nobody actually revealed what it was.
Riot initially planned to have a huge gathering of pro players from competitive titles like CS:GO and Overwatch along with some of the most famous streamers. Unfortunately this required them to travel to Los Angeles and this was made impossible by the US travel restrictions.
As a result of the coronavirus the company canceled these plans and switched to an online version by saying:It is with a heavy heart that we have decided to cancel our Valorant gameplay capture events this month in Los Angeles and Barcelona. Due to the unforeseen circumstances surrounding COVID-19, as a company we need to stand by our policy of putting Players first, and unfortunately this means steering away from our original plans to meet you in person at our event.Looking forward to seeing you (digitally) soon,
the Valorant beta client and Vanguard anti-cheat has been found publicly available to download on Riot's websiteno you cannot log into Valorant without a whitelisted account so you can stop now pic.twitter.com/qTB7L9ml5i
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) March 27, 2020
It’s very certain that there was an invite-only Valorant event over the weekend.
Valorant developers Anna Donlon, Joe Ziegler, Sal Garozzo and Trevor Romleski will show off the game to attendees to start the weekend, and players will also have an opportunity to face off/capture footage against current Alpha testers on Sat/Sun, i'm told https://t.co/FadjKzWxUT
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) March 26, 2020
Further proof of that is the game’s client. As of this Saturday, the client of the client is available to download, but you can’t actually do anything with it. In order to log in your account needs to be approved for Valorant, so unless Riot says so, you can’t yet try it. Chances are it was used by the people attending the online event. On the other hand, it could be Riot preparing for full-on test of the game with many more people than just a handful of streamers and pros. According to Rod “Slasher” Breslau we’ll see more Valorant news this week as Riot is rumored to release more footage. As for the beta, it should be coming soon.
Stay tuned for more Valorant updates.
