Riot’s first-person shooter game has been in Closed Beta since early April and won the record for the most hours viewed by a game in a day with nearly 34 million hours of watch time. Peak view on the same day also recorded 1.7 million views, second only to Worlds 2019.
Following the success of the Closed Beta, until the end of May 29, there were a series of major Esports tournaments of VALORANT such as the ESPN Esports Valorant Invitational, the 100 Thieves Valorant Invitational, the Fnatic Valorant Open Tournament, and the Twitch Valorant European Showdown.
How Does A Game That Hasn’t Been Released Officially Achieve These Milestones?
In the past 3 years, there are two games that have dominated the FPS (not counting Battle Royale games like Fortnite) which are Blizzard’s Overwatch and Valve’s CS: GO. But realistically, the two can hardly go too far.
Overwatch is insanely fast. If you haven’t played a game like Overwatch before and watched an Overwatch pro match, chances are you won’t be able to catch up on what’s going on.
On the other hand, CS:GO has tactical, realistic and relatively slow gameplay. At the highest levels of competition, rounds are often dictated by position and superior strategy rather than reaction time and good targeting. As a result, teams spend a lot of time moving into position before the fight begins. And, for the audience who love this game, Valorant Betting is something that you shouldn’t miss.
VALORANT can become the best FPS game in the near future
Valorant is a 5v5 tactical shooter and is essentially a CS:GO clone of the core gameplay, but adds its own characters and skills like Overwatch. Matches will be played in a Bo25 format, with the winning team reaching the 13-match mark first. One team attacks while the other defends, every 12 rounds the two teams will switch sides. Currently, only Defuse mode is available. The assault team will try to plant bombs in a certain area. Meanwhile, the defending team must find a way to prevent this.
Besides, if one of the two teams kills all 5 members without placing the bomb, that team will win. If the defending team has planted a bomb and has destroyed all 5 members, the attacking team will have to locate the bomb and defuse it before it explodes.
There are currently 11 characters, or in the game called agents. Each character in a specific role such as Initiator (opening), Controller (control), Duelist (double-handed), and Sentinel (guard), with unique abilities. Each character has 3 skills along with an ultimate move (quite like famous MOBA games). The skills are relatively diverse, from creating smoke bombs, dropping grenades or spy cameras to damaging effects like Cocktail Molotov, piercing arrows and acid grenades.
Some of the more magical abilities like Omen’s ultimate called From the Shadows, which will essentially teleport across the map, or Sova’s ultimate – Hunter’s Fury, which has the ability to fire 3 energy beams High-damage charges can penetrate walls and fly across the map, marking anything they fly over. But even these skills aren’t likely to have as big of an impact on the game as some of the ultimates in Overwatch, such as Zarya’s moves like Graviton Surge and Genji’s Dragonblade. This can be the reason explaining why Valorant Betting is also trending at this time.
CS:GO offers casual shooting gameplay while Overwatch seems to overdo it by putting in too many cool skills. As a result, VALORANT is overcoming most of these weaknesses and earning itself a lot of praise from gamers and followers.
With CS:GO’s ability to solve the biggest problems, it’s adding another layer of strategy that speeds up the game that’s both fun to watch and still appreciated. At the same time, the skills are not too strong to decide the game like in Overwatch. The end result is that we get a game that is accessible, even for players who have never played Valorant before, which is a delight to watch.
Unlike CS:GO, which has remained essentially the same since launch, Valorant agents allow the game to evolve over time with new skills and new strategies. And unlike Overwatch, which currently has a total of 32 heroes making it more like a MOBA than an FPS, Riot is taking a more careful approach to adding characters. With only 11 names at the moment, it will be easier to get to know and master the agents.
“Agents create challenges in the game; We’ve had a lot of conversations about what works in tactical play and what doesn’t,” Romleski said. “Complete and team-based gameplay is important, and we’re still trying to figure out more suitable ways to exploit characters in a tactical shooter. We had a lot of fun moments, at one point we tried out an ability that sounded great in theory, but turned out to be absolutely no good to the game.”
