Valorant’s 0.5 Update Is All About the Development Team
Valorant’s 0.5 gameplay changes reveal insight into the development team’s plans for competitive play. Because the team copied combat from their competition, Counter-Strike (CS), Valorant will have to distinguish itself elsewhere. The developers are connecting with the community while they struggle to balance the game for its official release.
Emulate the enemy or earn a distinguished identity?
Valorant has been poaching professional players by emulating the mechanics of their competition. Taking heavy influence from CS’s gun mechanics, Valorant’s learning curve is flat for veteran players of Riot’s top competition. Many players are even referring to the guns that make up Valorant’s arsenal by the names of their CS counterparts. Valorant’s emulated mechanics and made-for-esports gameplay have enticed many CS players to try the game out. However, not all aspects of a successful shooter can be emulated easily.
The development team will have to prove to their playerbase that they are capable of more than emulating other games. Similar to CS, Valorant’s economy and map design are critical aspects of competitive play. The development team is not afraid to implement changes to both aspects of gameplay:
Total credit cap is is [sic] reduced from 12,000 to 9,000… players/teams who manage to bank a high amount of credits are maintaining a rich economic state for too long, and it becomes a monumental challenge for the opposing team to dethrone their economy.
[On the map, Split,] attacking teams have been having difficulty finding a foothold in territory control across the map. We’ve made a few changes that should allow attackers better opportunities to contest A Main, Mid Top, and B Tower.
Aspects of the game that can’t be emulated from an established competitor will define the development team. The team will have to toil in-house to figure out how to distinguish itself with their economy and map design. Although Valorant is still in its beta, casual players and popular streamers have already expressed their disdain for its map design.
Machine guns prove that Valorant values communication and community
Regardless of its effect on the game, the development team has made it clear that they want this patch to have a positive effect on the community. Providing players with extra information, the team has detailed their findings and intent throughout the changelog. The changes to machine guns demonstrate their dedication to their players.
Aiming to make machine guns “shoot lots and lots of bullets,” but admitting that they “are significantly underperforming other weapons at their price points,” the team is honest with the playerbase. After stating their intent and admitting their failure, they promised that they will keep working to fix the issues:
Machine Guns are meant to be bullet hoses — powerful once they get going. This is a difficult balance to strike in a game where a single bullet from the Vandal will put you down. Our hope here is to make Machine Guns better at what they do.
The team’s ability to balance machine guns is not likely a determinate of Valorant’s overall success, but maintaining a positive relationship with the playerbase might be. If the team maintains its communication and continues to foster a relationship with the playerbase, CS may finally have met its match.
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