[2021] VALORANT | New ANIME Skins - GO VOLUME 1 Gun Bundle

Im glad this conversation is happening. This was one of the very specific things we tested out when making this set. Putting the keybinds aside even, we wanted to just make sure that when a player, even more specifically a Jett player, used this melee, it wasnt confused for her ult. The original execution of this melee wouldve seen the same Jett design on the base knife and we felt like that was less appealing than playing into the character for it, so we then switched full on to using Jett's actual ult knife but that had a lot of "why would we do that?" responses from folks early on. Without the final art it was hard to understand the reasoning and felt like it actually took away something that was unique to Jett. This was the happy medium. We still wanted to do the Jett inspired equip animation and had to find a suitable knife for it, and ultimately this helped in the clarity between what was Jett's ult and what was this melee.

Stickers would be an entirely different thing. Similar to something like putting your own emblem on a gun in CoD, stickers do present a possibility of being a thing, we'd just want to be mindful of the placement of them. This becomes increasingly problematic when you try to consider placement across a similar gun-type with varying skins. For example if you have a Grid Vandal with a sticker, ez, lots of space for it, but what happens when you try to use that same spot (or something roughly similar) when you use a Glitchpop Vandal.

all of our features are positioned as upgrades. across the board on guns and melee's we want upgrades to be an opt in choice for players. what this allows is for a player to get a skin that they like from a thematic perspective and keep it "clean" with regard to what is different from the base game experience. The biggest example of this would be like for someone who likes the dragon skin set but doesnt like the anims for the equip and reload. we dont want to force that on people

We're not ready to talk about that too in depth yet. Its being talked about internally and what I can say (as much as I hate blaming tech for things, I kind of have to in this case) is that the way we build our content, features at the moment are hard-coded to exist on specific levels, so any adjustment to that system would require a full rework of how we author our content. Its not impossible, its just a large task and so any change to the system gets worse over time the more and more we make. Hopefully though we'll have a solution to this in the future

we mention CSGO all the time. I even mention them in the anime video :P from a cosmetics perspective we do a lot differently so more often than not they arent as relevant of a comparison

all part of the same system. thats the BIG challenge. some of those things are linked and overridden level to level so for example the way its built out, level 4 (with finishers) is from a tech perspective built off of level 3 (with the equips and reloads) so one technically requires the other. A long time ago we talked about some sort of skill tree progression where you can choose what to unlock and when but that got thrown out as an idea purely due to time. These were pre-launch conversations and at the time getting a player driven choice in upgrades was not as important as just building upgrades period, so we had to prioritize what went into each system across the board

it was mostly from a visibility perspective, as well as opportunity for animation upgrade. If we held the knife like a dagger similar to reaver or elderflame, well technically you already have a spinning equip animation on that but not quite realized in the same way as it is with the current implementation where you spin it on the finger. If we then offered that as an upgrade it would be less impactful than the difference of holding it like a tactical knife.
additionally holding it like a dagger keeps the blade off to the side and isnt really as appreciated as much given its framing. in some cases like with reaver or ruin thats ok because the blade shape is fairly unique but in this case it made more sense to keep the design front and center

for sure. Yeah as of now there arent any immediate plans to change the system but we're keeping an eye on how players engage with it and what opportunities may exist to evolve things further

totally understandable. the one problem that exists there thatll let you in on is that Variants dont play well with that. so if you did unlock a variant and wanted to use it on level 1 for example, some things would break. We saw early on and didnt account for it but for example on the prime vandal we spawn vfx on your reload based off of it being on lv3 or 4. so in a dev build if you were to force a variant onto level 1 youd see a random vfx spawn when you reload and its just disconnected.
the system was built for the singular purpose of evolution which truthfully isnt the greatest so we'd have to carefully consider any sort of refactor of the system to support something new beyond what it currently does.

im sorry and i know that doesnt really solve the problem for you but we're trying to pay attention to what players are really interested in engaging with to plan on how we may or may not move forward with evolving the systems we've built

For singularity is this something you feel like mightve been interesting at first but then wasnt? Im curious to know for you what makes you want to go back to a previous level without the features and if maybe there wasnt enough clarity on what the features were in the beginning (we only have the videos in client for example but no way to play with it yourself)

This! We did a lot of gameplay testing too.