Riot Games has announced that their new popular shooter Valorant will be coming out of closed beta and officially launching in a few weeks on June 2. When the game was revealed, Riot Games initially said that the game would be coming out in the Summer. Executive Producer Anna Donlon and Game Director Joe Ziegler addressed the community in blog post and detailed what the team has learned from the closed beta and also detailed what’s next for Valorant after the game launches.
The developers have said that while the game is coming out of beta, it doesn’t mean that they still won’t look at feedback, “this isn’t your last chance to give us feedback, nor is this the only time we’ll be paying close attention to the needs of the community. Closed Beta isn’t for getting things ‘perfect’ for launch – it’s for making sure the right things are in place for us to start this journey together. We are moving Valorant to launch because we want to begin this relationship of service and engagement, and that means taking the first BIG step.”
One of the biggest things that happened during Valorant‘s closed beta period was the introduction of their anti-cheat technology called Vanguard. It caused quite a stir as it was revealed that it would be on all the time. The team made some changes after the backlash and added a way to only to be in use when it’s required. Talking about how effective Vanguard has been during the closed beta, the developers say that it has been but that doesn’t mean cheaters won’t stop trying to manipulate the game. “With Valorant being the grand unveiling of Vanguard, we’ve gotten a lot of inputs that help us understand what cheats – and forms of cheating – we can effectively deter with the platform. But during closed beta we’ve held off on deploying the second half of our tech, our auto-banning systems, because we needed this time to understand what to action on, especially when it comes to hardware bans. This will be different at launch. Up to now, while we’ve been able to track and understand the inputs by which we identify cheaters, many of our ban waves have been manually reviewed and implemented by our anti-cheat team (and they’ve still managed to ban thousands so far). Come launch, we will be more aggressive, widespread, and automated in our ability to detect and ban cheaters.”
As to what’s next for Valorant, the developers said that they have been working on things such as new agents, new maps, new skins, and new ways to compete with different game modes and “what an ongoing rotation of game modes might look like.”