The next big release from Riot Games has now officially released around the world as it released in stages to different regions – the beta of the game had been extremely successful as it found a huge following on Twitch nearly immediately, but as many predict it may be the next big esport, how is the full release shaping up? A tournament will be played shortly with a prize fund of $200,000 to the winning team, so as a comprehensive list of betting sites are preparing for this space too it’s important that things are set right early on to see a strong start in the esports scene.
The new map, and new agent – In the beta there were ten ‘agents’ that players could choose from as well as three maps in the playable pool – as the game released, an additional agent and map had been added along with some other gameplay changes – although most players have only had around 24 hours to adjust to the changes, the initial opinions are already in – the new map is good, it suffers some of the same problems that the previous maps did with perhaps too many angles or choke points that may be too easily defended, but small changes should fix this. The new agent has been met with a bit of a different reaction, however, as it seems not a lot of work has went into balancing her skill set just yet – this was expected as Riot have a history of releasing new champions in their other flagship game League of Legends without much balance, but many are hoping to see big changes to the agent before the $200k tournament is played.
No ranked, but probably for the best – It was made clear once the beta ended that ranked mode would be unavailable for some time on launch, but this is probably for the best. With the new map and new agent, there were bound to be some balancing issues as has already been seen, as well as a few optimisations in the game that fixed some hitbox issues and smoothed out performance. There are some changes coming to the ranked system too, but Riot has remained relatively tight lipped around what players may expect from these changes.
Ultimately, a lot of the changes are very good – the increased performance is very welcomed as many have seen a bump in frame rates which had been a big concern during the beta, a lot of the initial lag and delay has gone too. A few rounds of balancing for the new agent and map will solve many of the issues, however if this had been planned out during beta it may not have been such a glaring issue on day one of release, especially as the three maps and ten agents prior had already been through big rounds of changes too. The next step will come in a few weeks when ranked mode opens up again, it’s at this point where we may see the esport scene within Valorant start to develop – whether it can carve its own place in the market is yet to be seen, but interest is certainly there.