The enormous hype around Riot Games’ new shooter VALORANT is starting to slow down. One week ahead of the games’ official release date, the game is still loaded with errors.
On the first few days of VALORANT’s beta, the game attracted more than 1.7 million concurrent viewers and immediately broke the Twitch viewing record. Not even Riot Games could have imagined a better start for its entry into the world of first-person shooters.
After two months of closed beta testing, the game is supposed to fully launch on June 2. The official release will come with a new map, an agent and another game mode. Just like its competitor Counter-Strike it will be free to play.
But after its glorious start in April there is more and more criticism building up towards VALORANT, not everything is great or quite ready for launch in the games current state. Especially the recently introduced ranked mode is under fire for its poor design. One of the major critics is the poor matchmaking system that either had long queue times or very unfair teams with clear favorites and winners.
Broken promises: Poor performance and low framerates
Before VALORANT even launched, Riot Games promised high frame counts on low-end machines. But even two months into the closed beta, many players have frame drops or just low framerates in general. The worst case is to be seen on the map Split, where framerates on low-end machines are far away from the promised 144 FPS.
A significant problem for both casual and ranked games are the many map exploits. With the help of the agent’s special abilities, players can boost themselves to spots outside the map. This often results in unfair advantages which is unbearable for a competitive shooter.
Community wants more game modes
With the announcements of the official release date, Riot Games has already answered one major point of criticism: the lack of other game modes. While not sharing detailed information, Riot Games plans to release a new mode for the launch. If it will be a simple deathmatch mode or a cut-down version of the 5vs5 mode, nobody really knows.
But one fact is for sure: Due to the games’ design and lack of community content like maps and game modes, VALORANT will never be as versatile and have as many approaches like Counter-Strike with its highly active community and creators. For example, game modes like Wingman, Flying Scoutsman or Arms Race in Counter-Strike have all been created by people from the community. They then found their way into the game as an official mode.
Riot Games will have to put all lot of work into VALORANT in the next few days to satisfy the community. The servers will shut down on May 28 and will come back online with the games’ public version on June 2.
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Photo credit: Riot Games