Riot Games' five-on-five tactical shooter Valorant recently launched on PC, where it seems set for inevitable success after a recording daily player counts of three million during its much-hyped closed beta period. Now that the game's out in the wild, I took the opportunity to speak to several members of the Valorant development team at Riot Games, including the title's game director Joe Ziegler and tech director Dave Heironymus.
The interview below touches on a wide range of tech topics, including the game's custom forward renderer, the challenge of meeting their 128-tick processing target and which hardware plays the game best. Some game design questions snuck in too, including those passed on by Redditors in this thread - like tweaking the strength of the game's tagging mechanic, designing new characters and implementing fan-requested features like left-handed view models and retake servers.
In total, eight (!) members of the Valorant dev team took time to answer questions, so let's break down the full squad participating today. In alphabetical order, they are: