In their latest blog post, Riot Games admitted that they were a bit misleading to the players. Some abilities in Valorant can in fact inflict a lot of damage.
Remember when Valorant was still in closed beta? We remember. Back then Riot claimed that the game will be entirely focused on smooth gunplay and abilities will have a secondary support role.
To be clear, in Project A, shooting matters. You don't kill with abilities. Abilities create tactical opportunities to take the right shot. Characters have abilities that augment their gunplay, instead of fighting directly with their abilities.
— nicolo (@niiicolo) October 16, 2019
A few months later, pretty much anyone who has touched the game can tell you that’s not the case. Riot themselves also decided to discuss the subject in a recent dev blog post. Here’s what the Valorant Character Design Lead, Ryan “Morello” Scott had to say:
This statement isn't completely accurate—especially in a game that already had Raze and Killjoy's gameplay locked in before our announcement... Anyway, that was our mistake—a big part of that mistake was in missing the nuance (specifically that tactical fundamentals—not just “abilities don't kill”—are a key component).Guns provide the vast majority of kills, and even our damage abilities are designed with the goal of creating threat. When well-played against, guns should be the primary method used to finish off opponents that are preoccupied with a distraction, or trying to avoid the damage. In cases where that isn't holding up—like mid-combat Blast Pack usage—we'll fix those as part of our ongoing commitment to tactical gameplay.If this promise (abilities never kill) was the thing that made you come to try VALORANT, we're sorry if we misled you, even unintentionally. But our position is, and has been, that abilities that deal damage are a core part of tactical games—whether it be VALORANT or other tac shooters. We can unpack this topic more in the future if you’re interested!
It’s no secret that Raze and Jett aren’t the only agents with high damage potential coming from abilities. There’s also Sova’s ultimate, Brimstone’s ultimate, Killjoy’s turret, and many others. Hopefully the number of abilities that can totally nuke you won’t be going up in the future.
Another interesting topic in the blog post was the Valorant Anti-Cheat. The anti-cheat team has done quite a lot of work, dispersing manual justice to 1802 hackers:
I don't have a total number of bans to share but I didn't want you to leave empty handed so I brought something for you number fans out there: 1802That's the number of manual bans the anti-cheat team has issued after investigating suspicious players. While the overwhelming majority of bans are automatically applied by Vanguard, me and the rest of the team manually review suspicious accounts. This helps us find previously unknown cheats and also lets us evaluate Vanguard's performance. It also gives us an opportunity to manually accelerate the ban for the most disruptive players.
Vanguard has been a controversial topic ever since it was revealed that the program needs the highest possible access in your system. It also has to run from boot. That made a lot of people unhappy and many still refuse to play Riot’s tactical shooter because of it. Whether the company plans to change how Vanguard works in the future remains to be seen, but for now it is as it is.
- READ MORE: Nitr0 Could Be Switching to Valorant
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