Ever since Riot announced their new tactical FPS games there's been major hype surrounding it. People saying they'll quit other games in order to try and make a career out of it. At the time of writing this article Riot has released the closed beta and people can get access by watching specific Twitch streams that have drops enabled. Over a million viewers watching and praying for a drop convinces me at least that VALORANT is becoming the biggest game in the world before it is even fully released. Why? I can think of a few reasons:
1. Riot has a history of successful games. A company that manages to keep a game alive for 10 years (League of Legends) and still have it be a monster in terms of playerbase and viewership must be doing something right.
2. A lot of veteran gamers are criticizing the game's simple graphics and art style but fail to realize that that's one of the reasons it will be huge. Simple cartoony graphics are easy to run on almost any PC and that means most people can play it. Not to mention the game takes about 8 gigs of hard drive space. Compare that to the new Modern Warfare that takes over 180 gigs and has trouble running properly even on decent PC's.
3. The promise of superior anti cheat measures and low ping for everyone. As far as I know, Riot has been fairly vigilant about taking care of cheaters and with a lot of data centers, most people will likely have below 50 ping if they play in their region.
4. People are ready for something new. Ever since PUBG came out there has been a battle royale game. Then Fortnite came out and soon there were a ton of battle royale games and games with a battle royale mode coming out. But in my experience the gaming industry is usually a little bit behind on what people want. That's why there are still battle royale games coming out, the latest big one being COD Warzone. But even the mighty Call of Duty franchise can't match the hype of VALORANT. Everybody wants in and there are still people watching streams for days praying for a drop.
But how does VALORANT compare to other games?
From what I've noticed by playing the beta, it's slower paced and more tactical than Overwatch which is mostly a MOBA in an FPS format. It is closer to CS:GO an Rainbow Six Siege in terms of gameplay but it has more style. Even in the world of tactical FPS games there are things that are overused. For example, not every tactical FPS needs to be a military type game and it doesn't need to try to be super realistic in style.
A single game can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. You need to be patient and precise with your shooting. You need to get a feel for the weapons and utilize your abilities properly. There is almost no room for mistakes since one headshot is enough to take you out, so there will be very little running in gung ho.
Is the game fun? For me, yes. I firmly believe it will be the biggest game in the world. A free tac shooter with interesting characters that is easy to run and doesn't take a lot of space. There's very little that can go wrong in that formula. If you want in on the fun make sure that you make a Twitch and Riot account, link them and then watch streams with drops. Riot has been releasing more drops and it's likely they will keep releasing them. If by some chance you don't get in on the closed beta, remember that the game is being fully released in summer 2020 and it will be free to play.
