After a month-long closed beta, Riot Games has finally announced that Valorant will be launching on June 2, 2020. On the said date, people around the globe will be able to download the game for free from Valorant’s official website.
Valorant is Riot’s new free-to-play 5v5 tactical shooter that features some light hero elements. Gamers who have tried playing its beta have described the game as a mix of CS: GO and Overwatch, but with certain elements that make it unique.
The game’s closed beta will end on May 28 before everything goes offline as the developers prepare for its launch. While many people have been able to play the game during its beta state, all the progress in their accounts will reset once the official game goes live. This means that all players will start from ground zero.
Aside from this announcement, Valorant game director Joe Zieglar and executive producer Anna Donlon shared some of the developer’s plans for Valorant. This includes the release of new patch content, which is said to feature a new map, character, and game mode. It will be released shortly after the game’s official launch.
Zieglar and Donlon also confirmed their plans to add Valorant servers in cities around the world. According to their official post, their current short-term roadmap is to attain new game server deployments in major cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Madrid, London, and Warsaw, to handle the influx of new players. They also shared their dissatisfaction with the latency in Colombia, Argentina, and countries in Eastern Europe and their future plan to look for options to improve the server in these places.
Check out the full announcement here:
It’s @RiotSuperCakes and @RiotZiegler back with an important update on the future of VALORANT. pic.twitter.com/qGZfv3DWEb
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) May 21, 2020
Valorant stirred the gaming community when it announced its closed beta last April 7 on Twitch, and drew more than 1.7 million concurrent viewers to the streaming platform.
The game was first teased by Riot Games under the codename Project A in October 2019. It was then officially announced on March 1 with a gameplay video that was uploaded on Valorant’s Official Youtube Channel.
Valorant was received well by gamers but was criticized for its anti-cheat software, Vanguard, which runs on a kernel driver that can access the computer system. Riot immediately released a statement and said that the driver is secured and will not send any information back to them. They also launched a bug bounty program for players who will report any vulnerabilities with the software. Ziegler and Donlon also confirmed in their official post, that players could disable the Vanguard Anti-Cheat system when the game is not running.
Other than that, it seems that Valorant is a new tactical shooter game that everybody should look forward to. Want to know more about Valorant’s launch, you can read their official blog post.