confirmed: Riot's 5v5 competitive tactical shooter with magic and stuff, code named Project Ares, is now officially named VALORANT
Riot has activated the Twitter and Twitch channels pic.twitter.com/w9dC8pucmt
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) March 1, 2020
If I’m being honest most of this blog is because of Slasher. Last night he dropped the bomb shell that Riots highly anticipated shooter “Project A” has activited their Twitter and Twitch channel under the name “VALORANT”. This is technically Riots first game since they came out with one of the most popular games in the world 10 years ago, League Of Legends. If League has taught us anything over the years it is that VALORANT is going to be massive.
The game has A LOT of expectations which is never good. The last game I remember with this much hype coming out was “No Mans Sky” and that game was tragically bad. Talk about a waste of $60. VALORANT is supposed to be a direct competitor with Overwatch and CSGO, while seemingly ignoring Fortnite all together, of course Riot hopes the Fortnite crowd will come play their new game but from an outsiders perspective with very little, if any, inside knowledge I think Riot is okay with letting the Fortnite kids grow up a little bit and naturally move on.
Per Slasher, a lot of information including details about the beta will come out tomorrow March 2nd. Riot is also supposedly flying out a bunch of pros and streamers sometime in March to test out the game at Riots studio in LA.
second batch of of Valorant screenshots from IGN. one map looks a bit like Mirage pic.twitter.com/JT0BVaT27K
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) March 1, 2020
Riots “press embargo” is supposed to lift at midnight PST with a whole lot more information but above are linked some pictures from the game. This is has the potential to be one of the bigger games and something I’m more interested in, has potential for massive esport success. I would say the biggest challenges Riot faces in making this a succesful esport is convincing the Asian market to care about it, North America and Europe will buy in but the money is in Asia. Super excited to see how all of this develops, I do wish they had a better name for the game though. Valorant is just a mouthful.
Pretty long but in depth breakdown of all the Valorant info we have right now.
A few things we noticed when we first saw Project A / @PlayVALORANT 's announcement a while [a thread]
Firstly – clear inspiration from TF2 art direction. No surprise here as the Art Director for "A" is also the Art Lead on TF2 – Moby Francke.
h/t @Slasher pic.twitter.com/ojCpeLJTBm
— Yang (@YangCLiu) March 1, 2020