Valorant is coming to console, and it feels shockingly good to play
Riot Games has officially announced that Valorantis coming to consoles. The announcement of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions of the tactical shooter came during the Summer Game Fest show on Friday, but Polygon had a chance to check out the game early and talk to its developers about how it translates to the new platforms.
Bringing Valorant to consoles was a no-brainer for Riot, according to its developers. After all, in the studio’s opinion, the idea of an audience that wants a complex tactical game isn’t unique to PC. Those kinds of players exist on consoles; they just haven’t really had a game that fits that niche.
“We’re working from the assumption that competitive players are competitive players no matter which platform they choose to play,” Arnar Gylfason, Valorant’s production director, told Polygon. “It is a bit of a leap of faith… to take this hardcore competitive tactical shooter to a platform that doesn’t have the same background and history of tactical shooters as PC.”
But even if the audience is there, Riot’s bigger challenge was making sure it got the gameplay right when translating it from PC to console.
“The guiding light was always that the game has to feel good to play on consoles for us to want to make it,” Gylfason said. “That was always true. When the game didn’t feel right or wasn’t fun to play, we were like, We either need to solve this or not [make] it.”
The first big hurdle was figuring out how to translate Valorant’s methodical shooting to a controller. Precise gunplay is the name of the game for Valorant’s PC version, so the console version needed to match it without the benefit of a keyboard and mouse to make that precision easier. Riot’s answer to this is something called Focus Mode, which lets players enter a different, lower-sensitivity mode when they pull L2 or the left trigger.
According to Gylfason, this mode serves two purposes for Riot. It allows for the kind of precision that Valorant’s quick gunfights necessitate,
Read more on polygon.com
