Valorant is one of those games where, every time you look, it’s somehow very different. Riot has maintained a ferocious pace of updates since launch, introducing new agents, abilities and maps alongside a cavalcade of cosmetics: if you’re not embedded in the scene, keeping up can be absolutely dizzying.
And recently a specific grumble has acquired some traction among players. Even when you are embedded in the scene, and know about the newest agents and their abilities, the sheer amount of utility spam in the game now can make things hard to parse.
If you’ll forgive the shorthand, Valorant began as a spin on Counter-Strike that added superpowers, with each agent’s playstyle shaped around their unique abilities. Over time there’s been something of a utility creep, and now the game is stuffed with crowd control abilities that take over players’ screens, blind them, cause stuns, knockback, and so on. The comparison that players often reach for is, appropriately enough, League of Legends.
So to take the most recent agent added to the game, Waylay is a hyper-mobile duellist that can zip around using beams of light, but also slow and hinder enemies with other abilities. It can be an incredibly frustrating match-up and one where, crucially, it feels like the abilities are taking over the actual gunplay as the most important factor.
Sentiments along these lines were recently expressed on X by esports pro and captain of Team Vitality Sayf, who plays Valorant competitively and writes:
“Valorant promised gunfights will decide, but recently I just feel so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of utility. During chamber meta at least people got to aim and play a traditional shooter, now good luck seeing your screen some rounds.”
I think “overwhelmed” is a good way of putting it: You literally can’t tell what’s going on in Valorant sometimes. Sayf’s statement provoked a response from Dan Hardison, the Valorant live balance lead, who goes by the online handle of Penguin Valorant.
“For what it’s worth the balance team generally agrees with this take,” writes Hardison. “We’re investigating ways to make this better but we’re too early to commit to any details or get into specifics unfortunately.
Getting into specifics will at some point be necessary, because we’re talking about a pretty fundamental part of Valorant’s identity. The problem isn’t the abilities per se: You could argue that the abilities are Valorant’s secret sauce and what distinguishes it from the obvious competition. The problem is how dominant they now feel in matches and how Riot is going to dial that back without losing Valorant’s character: It faces a version of, as player Seed describes it in a reply, “the unstoppable hero shooter dilemma.”
Valorant continues to tick along and seems to retain a healthy playerbase, though Riot doesn’t release numbers, and last year added its first new gun in four years. Much of Riot’s recent focus has been on policing cheating and bad behaviour in a wider sense (last year it even took on the Quixotic task of tackling off-platform conduct), even going so far as offering a bounty to anyone who can exploit its proprietary anti-cheat. Next to that, you’d think tidying up some screen clutter would be a walk in the park but, if Riot really does want to solve this issue, I suspect the problem goes further than just toning down some visual effects.
