These technical tricks solve the mystery of why Valorant feels so good to play

techradar.com:

League of Legends developer Riot Games translated its prowess with online multiplayer successfully to the FPS genre back in 2020, revealing a fondness for the severe angles of Counter-Strike in the process. To this day, Valorant remains a popular – if highly technical – shooter.

The making of Valorant sounds like one long technical nightmare, however, with Riot prioritizing polish and coding smarts in order to make a shooter that rewards pinpoint accuracy while remaining scalable across wide range of drastically different machines.

I spoke to Riot’s senior principal engineer for the game, Marcus Reid, to glean further insight into the tech under the hood that’s allowed the free-to-play FPS to maintain its success two years on.

A game that demands such high skill and accuracy wouldn’t work without high tick rate servers. “We did a whole bunch of experiments with really high-skill players to figure out how the game plays best,” Reid says. 

“We found we really needed 128 tick rate servers to hit our targets. We also want the vast majority of our players to be under 35 millisecond ping. That's kind of the optimal conditions.”

A lower tick rate or higher ping introduces delays, which worsens problems like peeker’s advantage – an “artifact of networked gameplay”, in Riot’s words, which leads to a crucial split-second advantage for a player peeking around a corner over the opponent facing them. The issue is often discussed among competitive teams, and has led to high profile disputes over player ping.

That said, making Valorant a highly scalable game was still a priority. Riot continues to make the game accessible to players using a wide variety of setups. Additionally, it doesn’t shy away from display solutions like Nvidia Reflex –