Riot has released Valorant - an incredibly addicting game that is inspired by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch. At first sight, the game looks like a competitive tactical shooter, but later you’ll discover that each player has magical skills. All of this combined with awesome graphic design makes the game unique and exciting. Currently, the game is available only in beta mode. Players can receive a beta key by watching the Valorant stream at Twitch. Just select stream with tag “Drop enabled”.
Valorant from the inside
The whole gameplay is pretty similar to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, especially when it comes to features like the movement and shooting mechanics, strategy, map design, and weapon types. On the other hand, the combination of powers, the skills, and the ultimate systems are similar to Overwatch. As in CS: GO, there are 2 teams, each having 5 players. One team has to plant a bomb and the opposite team has to deactivate it. An alternative way of winning is to kill all the players in the other team. The game is based on rounds. The team that reaches 13 victories first wins the whole game. After the first 12 rounds teams change roles, attackers become defenders and vice versa.
The economy of the game is one of the most similar aspects to Counter-Strike. You earn money at the beginning of each round and if you kill an enemy you earn money too. You can spend this money on guns, special abilities, and shields. All abilities in Valorant are similar to CS: GO grenades (smoke grenades, HE grenades, flash grenades, and Molotov).
Agents in Valorant are inspired by Overwatch. Omen is a Valorant agent who has the same design and uses the same teleport mechanics as Overwatch's Reaper. Sage has the ability to build an ice wall which is the same as Mei’s skill. Also, Sova and Hazo are incredibly similar to Raze and Junkrat. Each character has unique skills, voice lines, and skins. Even though Valorant is currently being played in an test version, there are already a lot of skins in the store which players can buy.
Analytics
There is no doubt that Valorant will become a popular esport game and due to a lot of statistics (such as win rate, k/d, rank, score, and kills), players will need to see reports to analyze their game. There are a lot of analytical services, the most detailed stats about the player are provided by means of Valorant Tracker. When Riot releases the game and tournaments begin, analytics will become an important part of the game process which will help you to improve your stats and will also give you the possibility of checking the stats of the top players.
Valorant system requirements and performance
One of the most important aspects of each esports game is performance. Counter-Strike is widely known as a game with the best optimization in the world. Some players that upgraded their PC and overclocked their systems can play CS: GO smoothly at 300 frames per second. Counter-Strike is optimized so well that you can run the game in a 15 years old PC. It seems that Valorant will become the new discipline in esports and it already has great performance. During the game, I never suffered lag or network issues. Like Counter-Strike, Valorant is able to run on low-end hardware.
Minimum requirements:
CPU: Intel i3-370M
RAM: 4 GB
OS: Windows 7/8/10 64-bit
Video card: Intel HD 3000
This hardware will be enough to stay above 60 frames per second. The game is well optimized and developers have also excluded all unnecessary objects from the maps, leaving only the important ones, which increases performance and allows the game to run in low-end hardware.
Summary
It seems that Valorant is taking the first place in popularity, leaving Overwatch and Counter-Strike behind. It’s already the game most viewed on Twitch and it will probably have a record count of online players in the game. Their 128-tickrate servers have a lot of potential and the game will probably become a top of esports branches. Riot already announced that the game will be released in “summer” 2020. Hopefully, COVID-19 will not have an impact in their plans.
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