MeinMMO author Dariusz Müller is dissatisfied with the current selection of PvP titles as a big shooter fan. He has surprisingly found joy again in a 3-year-old tactical shooter and hopes it can entertain him until the next major release.
The shooter market has been offering few exciting new releases for months, and I have been dissatisfied with the current selection of shooters for a while.
Moreover, it seems to me that every new shooter is a Battle Royale or EFT-Like – and I am not a fan of either subgenre. I am probably not the only shooter fan looking at the market and not knowing what to play.
In addition, the major franchises have only brought disappointment after disappointment:
- Battlefield 2042 continues to try to save the failed release, but it is still not where it should be.
- The CoDs of recent years have also disappointed many fans who are still complaining about SBMM
- Halo Infinite has lost a large portion of players after a long content drought
- Ubisoft’s XDefiant, which I have high hopes for, has once again delayed its release
- Counter-Strike 2 lacks a ton of content and launched with many technical issues
- Overwatch 2 is occasionally fun for me, but the title doesn’t really deserve the 2 after even the PvE campaign was cancelled.
My “rock in the surf” was for a long time Rainbow Six Siege. I kept returning to the tactical shooter, but currently, I have completely lost interest in the game. This is partly due to changes that I personally don’t like and partly due to the ongoing major cheating problem.
3-year-old shooter ignites my ambition, suddenly fun
After jumping from shooter to shooter over the course of the year, I returned to Valorant after a longer break. I had played the title from Riot Games for a few hours in 2021, but lost interest again before reaching level 30.
I had no desire to unlock the various agents or invest the time to learn their abilities. What I wanted to play in 2021 were movement shooters. I wanted to jump, slide, and dropshot, not stop shooting for my weapons to hit anything.
But 2023 has sparked my ambition and I have a lot of fun improving in Valorant. I spend several hours a week training my aim and considering how to use my gadgets most effectively.
The will to improve makes Valorant interesting
In Valorant, the well-known principle applies: “Easy to learn, hard to master.” It is really not complicated to understand and use the individual abilities of the agents. But it makes a huge difference how well those abilities are used. Sometimes it’s small differences that have a big impact.
For example, when I place my turret with the agent “Killjoy,” there are probably hundreds of pros and high-Elo players rolling their eyes and shedding a tear because the position is just not optimal. But I can learn from exactly those players.
If I have no time or desire to play myself, it’s YouTube videos and streams that I watch with interest because I benefit from them in terms of gameplay. In short: Valorant is so much fun for me right now because it ignites my ambition and motivates me to want to get better.
Even if I get beaten up by smurfs and am salty for a short time, I can ultimately take something positive from the time played because I can copy their tricks. In general, matches against better players spark my ambition, and I play my best rounds when I am actually at a disadvantage.
Brilliant framework meets isolated issues
I want to be honest with you. There is no such thing as the perfect game. Valorant also has its problems. The sometimes extremely toxic player base is probably one of the biggest, and especially for women, it can get really uncomfortable in this shooter.
Also very critical is the smurf problem. In the lower to middle ranks, there are regularly smurfs in matches – both on the enemy team and among the random teammates on your own team. One can only hope that your own smurf is better.
Both can really be frustrating, which is why I absolutely understand if someone doesn’t feel like playing the shooter. Nevertheless, Valorant is for me right now technically one of the best competitive shooters – if not the best.
The servers are incredibly stable, the hitbox works extremely reliably, and the peekers’ advantage1 is by no means as bad as in other shooters. I have been playing the shooter for several months now for several hours a day and have never experienced FPS drops or crashes. Valorant runs damn smoothly and has strong performance – even relatively low-performance PCs get sufficient FPS.
Cheaters are almost non-existent in Valorant because Vanguard, the anti-cheat system, really does an excellent job. I can fully focus on what makes me enjoy a shooter: focused, competitive gameplay with the fundamental idea of getting better.
I have finally found joy in learning and mastering a shooter again, and therefore I hope that Valorant continues to be as much fun for me in the coming months or years as it is now.
If you want to discover more shooters:
The 14 best multiplayer shooters of 2023 for PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, and Xbox
- Peekers-Advantage bedeutet, dass der Spieler im Vorteil ist, der aus einer Deckung heraus in den Schusswechsel geht, während der Spieler, der einen Winkel hält, im Nachteil ist. ↩︎
