Valorant’s Executive Producer Anna Donlon took to Twitter to release a hefty load of information and Riot Games’ plans with Valorant. The centre of the announcement was episodes & acts and here’s everything you need to know about them.
Basically, an episode will be a significant in-game update that will bring a host of new features along with it. You can expect to see a new completely new map or new gameplay mechanics or other major and noticeable improvements along with every episode. Donlon stated that they expected an episode to last around 6 months, with a few minor alterations in the schedule based on community feedback.
Each episode will be further divided into 3 acts, each of them will be about two months long. Each act will also introduce a new playable agent at the beginning, along with their story. While stories and narrative don’t hold particular importance in a competitive title such as Valorant, they are important to build the in-game lore and define the characters. The first piece of the story came out on the same day as the public release. The cinematic trailer starred Phoenix and Jett, both of whom are duelist class agents. The trailer began with Phoenix chasing Jett through a quiet Venician town, followed by an adrenaline-filled chase and fight sequence. In the end, we saw a glimpse of the floating island that can be also seen in-game. Along with the story, each season will also have a Battle Pass and new skins will be added every week or two.
Valorant is closely following Overwatch when it comes to introducing new characters, maps and modes. By regularly introducing new characters, Overwatch did suffer from an integral problem, an over-cluttered roaster of characters. Thankfully, Riot Games has promised that they will increase as well as decrease the number of agents releasing every year based on community feedback.
Coming to the subject of community feedback, Donlon really emphasized on the value of the community and their remarks. New features such as early surrender, remake matches and timeouts have been introduced in the game based on the feedback. The community suggestions are also deemed worthy while curating new game modes.
Lastly, a note on cheaters was shared. Previously, Valorant’s anti-cheat system had banned 200 players in just 10 days. A dedicated team is working under Donlon to keep the cheaters at bay and constantly coming up with new ideas to identify and ban cheaters. At the same time, players are also urged to report cheaters and keep the community safe.