Riot Games has shared a huge update on Valorant and its future.
No less than Anna Donlon, the head of Valorant Studios, came on stage on yesterday’s Unreal Fest Seattle 2024, to announce that Valorant was moving into Unreal 5. A clip from Donlon’s presentation was shared by Twitter user Valorant Leaks & News. But Epic also uploaded the entire event on YouTube, so you can watch this clip as part of this presentation here.
In the clip, Donlon also revealed that Riot Games is planning to “expand the Valorant universe into new playable experiences.“ This absolutely looks like Riot intends to ape Epic Games’ own strategy to shift their own live service title, Fortnite, into a platform.
In fact, it isn’t even remotely subtle. Epic announced Fortnite Experiences last year, with three very distinct game modes in Fortnite that can clearly stand as different games. Lego Fortnite is a survival game with Lego game mechanics, Rocket Racing is an arcade racer, and Fortnite Festival is a rhythm game.
So are we really set to get a Valorant Racing in the future? Not necessarily, as Riot Games have different specializations among their studios. Under Riot Forge, Riot has released several spinoff League of Legends games, such as action RPG The Mageseeker, the Metroidvania title Convergence, and yes, a rhythm game called Hextech Mayhem. Fans are now eagerly anticipating 2XKO, a fighting game spinoff made by a different team in Riot with Radiant Entertainment.
What Riot Games could be planning is that these different spinoff games would not be sold separately from Valorant, but be packaged as different game modes. And that could mean they are also free to play, since that’s how Epic did it with Fortnite.
We already know fans would love to have a free-to-play fighting game, Valorant license or not, and that could be a huge experiment if the older fighting game community would be willing to embrace a high profile game with a complete live service model. Other games they already made, like a tactical RPG or Metroidvania, don’t seem to fit that monetization model. But maybe Riot Games is interested in that experiment.
Given that Riot had to recently shutter down the Riot Forge initiative, however, we believe they will only pursue ideas that they are certain will be profitable. So we’ll see how these announcements play out. But hey, at the very least, we can reasonably expect Valorant will be updated for the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox. We know this upgrade is coming to PC first, and what if this upgraded version will make its way to the Switch 2?
In the meantime, you can choose to watch the Unreal Fest Seattle 2024 presentation, or read our transcript of Donlon’s comments below.
“We have squeezed literally every ounce of everything we could get out of UE 4, so now we make the move to UE5, and that is not an easy feat when your game is a live service game but it is necessary for sure.
And this upgrade is not going to significantly change how Valorant looks or performs, at least not right away. But here’s what I can say.
There are many developers back at Riot who are incredibly grateful for what Unreal has allowed us to do for players. And there are many developers back at Riot who are very excited about what UE5 can do for us in the future.
Maybe, those devs are working on something I can’t talk about. Maybe, those devs are thinking about ways to expand the Valorant universe into new playable experiences. Maybe, we feel very fortunate to have everything UE5 can offer for our disposal.
And maybe we are super stoked, that because we chose Unreal for Valorant, we can move our devs around, and our tech around, and our everything around, really really easily, to explore those totally hypothetical playable new experiences.
So maybe, you’ll see me or someone from my team in the future, with a very different sort of presentation. But whatever comes next, you can count on us to keep working to deliver the best possible player experiences to our players. We know Epic and Unreal share our goals and excitement for the future of gaming. So really, our relationship is just getting started.”
