Just this past week, Riot Games finally unveiled Project A, the highly anticipated competitive FPS game from the legendary studio. It’s been touted as the “Counter-Strike Killer”, with expectations to put the nail in the coffin of CSGO for once and for all. Before we get to that question, let’s take a look at the game itself.
In my opinion Valorant seems to be a nice combination of Counter-Strike and Overwatch, with the gunplay and economy system of CSGO, and the abilities and “agents” of Overwatch. It’s 5v5 tactical gameplay, with each team having players choose an “agent” to play as. They’ve posted a gameplay preview of the game, which I’ve posted below:
I’m personally very fond of the gameplay preview, and I think it looks great. My only concern is the abilities and how they will come into play. Abilities worked out very well in a game with the style of Overwatch where it’s sort of just one big hectic mess. That’s not the case with Counter-Strike style games, where it’s cool and calculated.
That being said, if there is anyone who can pull off that sort of combination, it would be Riot. That being said, this is their first voyage away from League of Legends, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some people have hesitations to believe this will be good. Having played LoL for many, many years, I have no doubts that Riot will live up to what they’ve promised. I’d like to look more in depth in the agents and their abilities though, since that’s the one situation I’m actually worried about.
It seems that each agent has 4 abilities they can use. Some seem vastly overpowered. For example, Omen’s ultimate basically allows you to freely teleport to any place on the map, and you have a seemingly expendable life. That’s freaking wild, and seems incredibly busted out of context. How it will actually play may be different. This is where Riot and balancing will come into play, which to be fair they are pretty good at. Some people think Riot can’t balance for shit, which I say if that’s the case, how has League of Legends remained at the top of the ladder in esports? If they can’t balance, a game isn’t going to remain king. That’s for damned sure. Alas, I’m not sure how I feel about the abilities…I’m sure it’ll pan out but I’m cautiously optimistic.
The preview showed off a search and destroy type game mode, which leads people to wonder will it be like CSGO where that’s the only game type? Or will there be others? I think it could go both ways. My guess would it would probably be based off just search and destroy, as that has clearly worked for many years with CSGO. I would be very open to allowing another game mode at least, to change it up a bit, but I’m not very optimistic on that.
Will this all help to make Valorant the expected Counter-Strike killer that it’s projected to be? No. No it won’t. I think this will take a HUGE stab at CSGO, but it won’t kill it. Counter-Strike has been around for years, and has a gigantic following. It’s going to take a whole lot more than one game coming out to kill it. I will not that some players, even though they aren’t the best in the game, are retiring from CSGO to compete in Valorant, so that’s a start. I’m not sure Valorant’s end game really is to kill of CSGO, as it was created with other games in mind as well, so I think Riot is aiming for it to be an entity on it’s own. Whether CSGO or Overwatch players quit for Valorant, that might be a driving factor in the success of their respective pro leagues, but I don’t think that’s the endgame with Valorant.
One other thing to note, and definitely saving the best for last for most people. This game will be free to play, which is HUGE for creating a large player base. With the game being free and Riot Games’s already gigantic following, this is a recipe for MASSIVE success. Only downside (which won’t affect League of Legends and Riot Games fans much if at all) is that it’s only coming out on PC. So for all the Xbox One/PS4 fans who had hoped they’d be able to play it, unfortunately that’s not currently in the cards.
Valorant is releasing this summer, probably in some form of a beta launch, which is fairly regular nowadays. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to it!
thoughtsfromthebench.com 