Considered the new generation offspring of Riot Games, VALORANT has been meticulously cared for since its testing phase with a grand promotional campaign featuring a slew of streamers and renowned organizations from the gaming world. At one point, the game broke multiple viewing records on Twitch.tv, but just a few days after its official launch, everything turned out to be completely opposite.
Specifically, the number of followers on Twitch.tv, VALORANT’s largest streaming platform in the West, has plummeted dramatically over the past few weeks. Although the number of viewers showed signs of increasing upon the game’s release, it was nothing compared to the testing period. Alongside players becoming accustomed to the game, the sharp decline in the number of streamers committed to VALORANT also contributed to the game’s falling metrics.
Not only has the follower count decreased, but the quality of VALORANT is also under serious scrutiny as users rate it quite poorly on Metacritic.com. Most reviews criticize Riot Games for hastily releasing this game while everything seems unfinished. The graphics are overly simplistic and somewhat crude, which is a significant drawback for VALORANT.
I was really confused in my first few matches, the game looked unfinished, everything was too basic. The animations were truly a joke, and everything else about the graphics, movement… made me reminisce about shooters from 2007. I really hoped for a lot but in reality, it has nothing but some streamers being paid to create some fake excitement.
The game feels like it was made for kids, a lower-tier version of Team Fortress. The settings and menu are quite nice and are the best part of the game, but the game itself is terrible. I can’t believe there are people choosing to play this game when there are so many better shooters out there.
I still highly doubt this is a finished game that people are excited about. The maps are too small, extremely simplistic to the point of minimalism.
It’s too slow, boring, the game is not smooth at all, and the types of guns are just awful. It could definitely be better, and I hope they will fix this.
The way Riot Games developed VALORANT is very similar to how they approached League of Legends about 10 years ago, creating a simple, easy-to-understand game, with lightweight specifications suitable for all types of computers and easy installation. This might have been appropriate a decade ago, but now it’s 2020, and everything is very different.
When League of Legends launched in 2009, DOTA 2 had not yet been released, and players were still playing DotA Allstars on the Warcraft III platform, with Heroes of Newerth only appearing in May 2010. At that time, League of Legends was almost the only independent MOBA game around. In contrast, VALORANT’s situation is entirely different; aside from blockbuster games, its direct competitors, CS:GO and Overwatch, are already significantly ahead.
Of course, VALORANT is still a newly launched game and has the potential to improve, but Riot Games needs to speed up, especially in the context that Valve is aggressively transitioning CS:GO to Source 2 at the moment.