State of the Agents - Dec. 2020

Howdy friends, with 2020 almost behind us we wanted to take a moment to talk about our current, high level thoughts around Agents, and a bit about how we are thinking of the future.

When the game launched we were focused on getting all the extreme outliers into a reasonable place. Right now things are fairly stable, but there are still some Agents/Classes that need some deeper thought put into them.

CONTROLLER POWER, DUELISTS vs INITIATORS

In particular, we have some plans to address the total power of Controllers (Omen, Viper, Brimstone) and to better differentiate the roles of Duelists and Initiators. At a high level, we want to encourage people to play with their teammates as much as possible and we believe that giving our Initiator and Controller roles a bit more team-focused power will help achieve that end. We are aiming to have our first set of changes to Controllers launching with Episode 2 and additional changes to Initiators and Duelists throughout Q1 of 2021.

With the release of Killjoy we felt that the Agents within Valorant have a good range of abilities to either augment, or enhance our core Tac Loop (Someday we will make a post about this). Even before the game launched we were feeling that there were some gaps within the abilities/tools Agents provided, this was evident due to there only being two Agents (Sova and Breach) with tools to break onto sites, the class known as Initiators. With all of that in mind, we quickly got to work on another Initiator, Skye. She not only provides crucial tools to break onto sites, but also per-round healing choice competition with Sage.

NEW AGENTS, MORE RISKS

From the start our goal with Agents is that they have a unique spot within the roster. Whenever a new Agent drops it keeps the game feeling fresh, making you rethink all of your current tactics, and form new ones that build on all the skills you have learned so far. Now that the basics are in place, we are going to take more risks with what each Agent introduces to the game, pushing some boundaries, and evolving what is possible in an ability based tac shooter.

For now we are keeping these boundary-pushing ideas a secret.

That said, we wanted to sneak some insight into the future here. The year will tear open with a Duelist for all you “lurkers” out there, who will keep you on your toes around which angles are truly safe.