Quick early takes on Valorant from an organised play perspective
GENERAL
Game’s pretty good.
ABILITIES (REGULAR)
Right now, tendency to use abilities (particularly at the start of rounds) is essentially hyperactive among all levels of the playerbase — I have it, I’m going to use it, and we’ll move vaguely towards setting something up based on all the stuff we just used 10 seconds into the round. Don’t think that holds for very long, even possibly in high-level pug play, because the non-generic nature of abilities means that you are giving up a LOT of information on almost all of those flourishes. You can’t be certain who threw that nade in CS, you can be certain that if you see Phoenix fire come down that Phoenix is on that site, that sort of thing. There are obviously going to be designed executes, and there are going to be aggressive entry executes and so on, but think you’re more often than not going to want to slow play it to the point that said information absolutely doesn’t matter anymore (and at most give up some info to get an orb or similar).
The biggest risk with regards to overall game health was creating an overload of movement abilities (because of what the consequences can then end up being for immobile characters), and I tend to think they’ve struck a nice balance here. Omen’s short-range teleport probably needs an early nerf, but Jett/Sage/Raze mobility all comes across as good but actually pretty fair (the crucial thing is that their upwards movements feel very ‘floaty’ and therefore pretty alright to defend against most of the time, unless they properly get the jump on you I’d say you probably win that fight).
Feels like it’s going to be a much bigger pain in the ass to get good at essentially trickshotting certain abilities in the way that you’d do with grenades, flashes, etc. in CS — animations feel a little weird. Could be a lot worse though.
ABILITIES (ULTIMATES)
Concern with these was always “how do you implement these without making them game-warping nightmares?” Implementation seems to be pretty good:
* You know exactly when every player in the game has or is about to get their ults, and they even have a little halo on the bar on the top of the screen, so…they really couldn’t be giving you better indication at that point.
* The ults tend to be markedly less powerful than in Overwatch or other hero shooters. The obvious comparison is Sova <-> Hanzo — if a Hanzo ults on your vicinity, you’re just going to die, while the way Sova ult works is very, VERY eminently evadable unless you’ve put yourself in a horrendous position.
* Even allowing for poor execution, most players are not at all used to using ults right now and will let them sit for way too many rounds, so maybe this changes when there’s more coordination about it, but: it feels like the ult charging rate is sufficiently slow that you’re rarely worrying about more than maybe two at a time.
Main criticism would be that too many of them (at least 4 out of 10) are effectively just differing variations on “AoE nuke” and it feels a little uninspired. Main uncertainty…everyone is absolutely awful at using them right now (your Sage definitely just raised you into a cloud of bullets), so impact at higher levels of play may increase pretty quickly as people figure it out.
MAPS (SPLIT)
My absolute first reaction to Split was “oh no, Nuke-style verticality” because of the tunnel near A, but that’s not really the case. Height advantages and disadvantages across the map absolutely matter to how fights play out, but it matters more on smaller levels rather than doing too much to dictate wider map movements in my opinion — the actual map plays out linearly if that makes sense, which as a MOBA guy with horrible spatial awareness, I’m thankful for.
Not really sure how to feel about this one at the moment. My original thought was “isn’t this just going to be a mid bloodbath constantly?” because it felt like one defender could do a whole lot to hold on both sites. And, well, it still is a mid bloodbath constantly usually, but if everyone in the game even has a halfway decent idea of how to use their abilities, both sites play a lot more openly for the attacking than they first felt like. Definitely also feels like THE map for lurkers to go lurk on and get those sneaky kills.
If I had to pick a map of the first three that ends up being Valorant’s long-term signature map, it’ll probably be Split (even though I’d like it to be Bind), and further to that, if I were an IGL and trying to figure out where to focus my study as the competitive scene starts up, it’d probably be into figuring out the ins and outs of executing on here. People are going to focus on the individual outplay potential (which there is a lot of because of all the open space and the platforms and such) but between difficult sites and lots of tight little holes and winding corridors, if you can coordinate, this is quietly an IGL’s dream.
MAPS (BIND)
Has to be the early favourite to be the early favourite. A is probably the best-designed site in the entire game, it’s a joy to contest. Terrain is set up well to make choices matter without being so cluttered or tight as to create too many “you’re dead and I took no risk to make it happen” scenarios.
The teleporter gimmick…early returns are that it seems to click. Long TP in particular does a great job of incentivising attacking teams to play ‘honest’ across the map and not Three Stooges Syndrome into A long etc., and teleporter noises are loud enough that if you get caught completely by surprise by it, it’s your own damn fault. Short TP seems to work well in terms of risk/reward for both attacks and defenders. Tend to think this is going to still pan out well as level of play increases.
Actually quietly think we’ll learn more from how ability dynamics are going to work on long B Bind more than anything else. With how the B teleporter works, I’m pretty sure the generic best defensive default is going to be 2 on B long unless you have the most confident sniper in the world, and if that’s true, the end result is I think you actually maybe have a lot of straight-up 0-second 2v2 fights through that area. Particularly thinking here in terms of how Breach/Brimstone/Viper are going to be able to set up a more mobile agent.
MAPS (HAVEN)
Feelings on Haven on both personal and competitive-looking level have faded quickly from ambivalence to dislike. The three-site concept isn’t new to CS/CS-likes, but there’s good reason for it being a long time since it was tried on what is presumably going to be a competitive map. Presuming that they’re building towards a CS-style map pool at release, have to figure that Haven won’t be the only three-siter too. Not saying that it’s impossible to get Haven or another three-siter right, but this doesn’t feel like it’s it.
Anyway, with Haven in particular…it’s an odd map. In some ways, feels like the way that B site’s implemented here (with window facing it), and also looking at just how long A/C long are, it’s all more an attempt to capture the feeling of mid-heavy, sniper duel-heavy CS maps like dust2?
In any case, don’t think it works as it stands. Defensively, the 5 barriers, and the way the map geography works, mean that either you’re sticking one on each point every single round and hoping nobody gets overwhelmed (they will get overwhelmed), or you’re having to do some insane prediction reads with where they’re going to go, which…that’s fun to play out in pugs (because there’s lots of running around and you feel like a hero when you guess right), but doesn’t seem to lend itself to interesting high-level play. Feels less bad offensively obviously, but still rarely all that satisfying. Terrain is too linear, site design feels a little lacking. I don’t know, I’ve had some fun moments playing on it but don’t feel great about how it it’ll scale out as such.
OTHER THOUGHTS
Gunfeel is excellent (which is good because nothing else would matter if it didn’t), kinda feels like an apotheosis of a trend of MP shooters getting better at this by just getting closer to how CS guns have always felt.
One of the big challenges on Riot’s end is going to be enabling the same sort of pugging culture that you have in CS:GO etc., because that’s never really existed on a large scale in League’s ecosystem for at least as long as I can remember, and there’s always been a sort of a way in which Riot’s games tend to work that discourages that (quickest comparison…think about how private servers work in CS:GO, compare that to how custom games work in League, there you go). It’s going to need that, and I think Riot realise from their experiments with Brawl etc. that they a) can’t just build that on their own effectively and b) will have to go out of their way to enable that being built by someone else.
They’ve gotten better at that sort of working with smaller stakeholders in League over the last couple years (the easy frame of reference here is always to look what happened with the tier-2 and tier-3 European ecosystem in League — those third-party relationships helped make League a world-beater in 2011–2013, they messed things up horribly for one reason or another 2013–2016 or so, it did a lot to undermine the game competitively in Europe and they finally realised that, and they’ve gotten better at it again in the years since) and the first esports announcement is talking the right talk on that front (I know it’s more in direct reference to stuff like third-party tournaments, and even Overwatch managed to do that, but the developer/API stuff is promising with regards to the sort of thing I’m talking about here), so we’ll see.
Way too early to go too hard into the business side of the esports side of it for the most part. If the game succeeds, it’ll automatically work as an esport, if it doesn’t succeed, it won’t, same as most multiplayer games that have (a chance at) mass appeal. Gun to my head, I say it succeeds on its own merits (the Riot branding matters but Blizzard has spent the last decade demonstrating that it isn’t a gimme), but I’ve tended to have a pretty poor hit rate on knowing what will and won’t fly at this sort of stage of development. Tomi Kovanen (aka lurppis) had an interesting Twitter thread talking about it from a CSGO business-related perspective if you’re interested in that.
