Last October, when Riot Games announced a slate of new titles, one of the outliers was Project A, a first-person shooter that combines the popular hero-based shooter genre with tactical gameplay. We now know Project A is officially called Valorant, and will launch on PC this summer as a free-to-play title. I traveled to Santa Monica, Calif., to spend a day in the offices of Riot Games to not only learn about the upcoming shooter from all angles, but also play it for several hours.
Telling The Tale
While most of the games announced during Riot's 10-year-anniversary stream are set in the League of Legends universe, Valorant is unique in that it does not feature any connection to Riot's juggernaut IP. "It was actually a point of debate for a while: Should we put this in [the League of Legends universe] or should we not?" says game director Joe Ziegler. "It was really hard to get the concept of this crisp, tactical shooter with mechanical bullets firing out of your gun, and then putting that on Ryze or putting that in the hands of a Piltover soldier ... it didn't mesh well with the fantasy we were creating. We needed to create a thing that we thought would be the right combination of this tight, mechanical, physical gameplay with this very rich, creative, well-established concept of abilities that we were playing."
Valorant takes place on a version of Earth in the near future following an event known as First Light. This event spans the entire globe, leading to big transformations to life, technology, and how governments operate. However, select people across the globe start to gain abilities stemming from this massive event. These gifted individuals are called Radiants.
In response to First Light, a shadow organization founds the Valorant Protocol, which pulls together Agents from all over the world. These Agents consist of Radiants and other individuals equipped with Radiant technology. Due to the backstories of these characters, the Valorant team features interesting dynamics as the individuals not only sometimes know each other, but they also come from a wide spectrum of backgrounds ranging from crime to the military.
Despite this intriguing setup to the universe, the development team wants to be subtle in the way it approaches storytelling. "I've worked in story-driven games and I've worked on games similar to this, and I've seen where you can over-invest in a certain area at the expense of the other areas," says creative director David Nottingham. "I'm a big believer that world building is about creating a foundation; you don't build the whole house and go, 'Here it is, it's done. No one can make any changes.' You build a strong foundation that then over time as you want to go, 'Oh let's set this part here' or 'Let's take this character in this direction because that seems interesting,' you have that flexibility to grow."
This approach is common in online multiplayer titles, with a drip-feed narrative giving players ample opportunity to dive as deep or swim as shallow with the lore as they want. While Nottingham likes enabling players to explore the story at their leisure, he likes this approach more for what it enables within the player base. "I honestly get excited about the stories that players are telling each other," he says. "I don't want this to be something where it's like, 'We are feeding you story. Receive our story. You're blown away by our story.' That's what movies and books and other things are for. Video games are like ... this is where our players get to jump into a world, take on roles, form relationships, experience it ourselves, and shape our experiences through playing the game. That's what excites me."