Riot’s new tactical shooter Valorant has officially launched. You can find all the important information about the release of the new shooter with patch notes here: Where do you start the download? What’s new for the release?

What is Valorant? Valorant is a competitive 5v5 tactical shooter for PC, developed by Riot Games. Many know Riot Games from League of Legends.

The game can be seen as a mix of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch, combining aspects from both games. It focuses more on tactical skirmishes like in Counter-Strike, while you also choose heroes with abilities, which you might recognize more from Overwatch.

How does Valorant work? Two teams of five players compete against each other to win the most out of 24 rounds. Both teams alternate between attackers and defenders.

If you want to know how Valorant plays: Mein-MMO author Leya has played it for you.

Where can I download Valorant? If you want to play Valorant, you can register on the official Riot page and download the client.

If you want to play Valorant, you need a Riot account. You can create one directly on the Riot Games website. With the client, you can then directly download, install, and start the game.

How large is the download? To play the tactical shooter, you only need to download 7.9 GB. If you have already played the game with the beta on your PC, the download will be even smaller, around 2 GB.

Valorant Patch Notes for Release – Differences from Beta

What is the difference between Beta and Release? Riot had already explained before that there would be some changes in Valorant at release. These changes include a new game mode, a new agent, and a new map.

Additionally, your progress from the Beta will be reset. If you have already unlocked agents or bought something in the shop, you will have to return all of that. Everything will be reset, and the purchased premium currency will be refunded.

Here you will find a summary of the patch notes in German. We will gradually publish important details online for you.

Gameplay and Balance

At launch, some agents received significant adjustments. The display of the mini-map, in conjunction with your own sound effects, was also revised. There were changes in:

• Sage
  • Healing Orb: Cooldown increased – From 35 to 45 seconds
  • Barrier Orb: Less health – From 1000 to 800 / Shorter duration – From 40 to 30 seconds / Friendly barriers are now visible on the mini-map
• Raze
  • Blast Pack: Maximum damage radius reduced – From 2 to 1 meter
• Jett
  • Cloudburst: Duration of the smoke effect increased – From 4 to 7 seconds
  • Tailwind: Now automatically breaks Cypher’s tripwire, but is briefly displayed on the map
• Phoenix
  • Flame Wall: Longer duration – From 6 to 8 seconds / Damage reduced – Instead of 15 every 0.25 seconds, now 1 every 0.033 seconds / Healing reduced – Instead of 3 every 0.25 seconds, now 1 every 0.16 seconds
  • Hot Hands: Healing slightly increased – From 3 every 0.25 seconds to 1 every 0.08 seconds
  • Hot Hands and Flame Wall now heal the same value over the duration of the ability (50 health)
  • Blinding Lights: Duration of blinding increased – From 0.8 to 1.1 seconds / Now costs 200 credits
• Omen
  • Paranoia will no longer be cast immediately but will be upgraded first and can then be activated.
  • For “Dark Cover,” you can now enter a “Phaser” world, where you can see through walls to place the shadow orb. However, it can still be used with regular vision (click to switch)
  • Control of “From the Shadows” is now via the “Fire keys” (Primary & Secondary) and activation with the skill key
  • Shrouded Steps: Target of the teleport for Omen is now visible on the mini-map and directly in the game world beforehand
  • From the Shadows – The ultimate can now be canceled before the full effect. Omen still loses all ultimate points
• Sound Visualization
  • Your “noise” from several actions is now better visible on the mini-map. Sounds from abilities, reloading, Spike interactions – You can now check on the mini-map how far these actions can be heard

Valorant – New Map Ascent and Update to Old Maps

What is this new map? To celebrate the release, Riot is not only giving us the new agent Reyna, but also a new map: Ascent.

According to the developers, the map is located in Italy and features a large mid area. The team that holds this area has control over the map and the two sites for the Spike. However, there are also other routes to keep the match exciting.

The new map is expected to be in rotation more often in the near future, so you can play it regularly right away.

What updates have been made to the old maps? On “Split,” the area in the middle has been rearranged. A bottleneck at some stairs previously put defenders at a disadvantage. Now this passage is significantly wider.

Apart from this clearly visible adjustment, there were many smaller innovations. Players who now leave the normal playing field should not survive this action anymore. The level collision has been further improved and the “smoothness” of the playing field has been increased. Over time, there should be fewer edges or corners where you can get stuck.

Additionally, the developers are still looking for spots where Cypher’s spying camera can be unfairly placed to block them.

Valorant Ranked is initially unavailable at Release

As at the start of the Beta, there is initially no competitive ranked mode at the release. Here is the developers’ statement on this:

Similar to the start of our “Closed Beta,” we are first focusing on ensuring that our service is stable before we activate competitive matchmaking.

This also aims to accommodate new players who, like the players at the start of the Beta, can now learn the game before they play competitively.

There will still be some adjustments to the ranked mode based on feedback from the Beta. Our plan is to bring some patches at launch for ranked.

Valorant developers in the patch notes (translated) – Source: playvalorant.com

However, the developers do not provide any information on when the ranked mode will start or what will change. Should there be new information on this, you will get it here on MeinMMO.

Performance, Bug-Fixes, Quality of Life, HUD & UI

In addition to the balance changes and adjustments to the maps, many smaller innovations have been made to improve performance and the overall gaming experience.

What can be said about performance? The developers want to minimize frame drops during firefights and have temporarily reduced the physical effects and some audio effects of bullets for this purpose. The system is expected to return in an improved variant, but there will likely not be any bullet drop or similar effects that would otherwise alter the trajectory of the bullets at release.

To improve the performance and stability of frames during matches, the developers adjusted many parameters and also took into account weaker or mid-range systems. Overall, it is expected that performance will be better on many PCs than in the Beta. For example, there are now special visual effects from the abilities of Omen, Sage, and Viper, which can be better processed by weak systems.

What can be said about “Quality of Life” improvements? There are many smaller changes that aim to make playing more enjoyable for you. Two changes are particularly important:

• There are no ultimate points anymore if you are not taken out by an enemy agent (No ultimate points for deaths by own abilities, fall damage, spike kill, etc.).
• For misconduct, the “Team” and “All” chat will be disabled for 72 hours, in response to harassment of players. If you are banned from chat, the “Party” chat will still function.

What can be said about HUD & UI? There are also a few small changes to help you see important information better or make the menus look nicer. For example, agents now have new small icons in the selection or the armor icons in the shop look a bit better.

What can be said about bug fixes? The developers have also addressed many small issues, such as the positioning of the Cypher camera or problems with Viper’s poison abilities or Jett’s gliding.

If you want to view the patch notes in detail, check out the official Valorant website. Here you will find the extensive adjustments in English.

Riot shares data on the Valorant Beta

This is what Riot says about the completed Beta: Riot Games released some interesting facts at the launch of Valorant:

• over 1.7 million users watched 34 million hours of Valorant simultaneously on Twitch
• viewers also watched a total of 470 million hours of streams about the new shooter.
• during the two-month beta phase, nearly 3 million players logged in daily.

What does Riot say about the servers of Valorant? Riot has also explained something about its servers, where Valorant is played:

• The developer states that they use 128-tick servers: Simply put, this means how quickly or at what rate the server processes data from its clients and supplies players with new data. The higher the tick, the more power and bandwidth the game requires.
• The servers should also offer a frame rate of up to 128 frames per second and provide more than 70 percent of players with a ping of under 35 milliseconds.
• The game is also supported by “Riot Direct”: this is a network of various internet service providers, according to Riot.

Shortly before its release Valorant lost a large part of its hype on Twitch – there, chatting replaced shooting. Viewer hours fell by almost 50%. It remains to be seen whether Valorant will become relevant again on Twitch with the release or whether the boost was mainly due to the coveted drops.

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