[2023] Switch sides // Switch skins. The Black Market Bulldog, Vandal, Marshal, Classic and Butterfly Knife Melee have unique Defender and Attacker appearances. Bundle hits your shop April 12th.

This is absolutely right. Truthfully we havent done the full load test to see what the memory impact would be if every player could load in with multiple skins, but there are some presumptions we can make.

- more skins and more memory = more load times. We want players to get in the game quickly and not have a bunch of things going on in the background preventing you from doing that- more memory means bigger hardware memory requirement. We are already decently strict on how much available memory the game takes up based on our hardware specs. if we raised that requirement, we could cut out a significant number of players who are at the minimum bar for hardware, and thats not good.

This inevitably will be a thing we have to look into at some point if we wanted to add more content and features to the game. Actually this was the same reason why the animated player card for RGX is only on the long version that you see in lobby, because we didn't know the impact it could have on your in game experience and we wanted to still be able to show that we're looking to add new things, just carefully.

Its multiple skins because for one player it might be just a vandal for A/D, which you're right in that case its just 1 more. But for another player they could want their entire loadout to swap. Then it gets more complicated.

Every player brings 18 skins in game with them (even the default weapons have a skin). for 10 players thats 180 skins to load into every game (we dont literally load them all at once but they need to be stored for when they're used). Giving players a default option to have A/D sided skins effectively doubles that number, now you're at 360 skins per game - we dont know if we can actually load that in without significant impact, especially on lower end hardware. We have to weigh the decision against the worst possible outcome.

We have not done the stress test to see the impact of more than we currently allow. We made budgets early on in development based off of what we needed for the game to ship, and made those budgets against the hardware we allow. One day its likely those budgets will get revisited, and we'll see what we gain from that.

Also weapons are just one part of it all. Every part of the game has a limit and a budget. Guns, Maps, Characters, UI, the game-sate itself, audio, etc. Everything has an impact and the more we add, the more risk we put on someone having a bad time

Imagine this scenario. You're using 10 year old hardware which does run the game to a degree that we're ok with. You go to pick up a weapon on the ground, but you get omen blinded, Astra ults, the bomb gets planted, and an ally dies, and you experience the worst hitch you could imagine all because that gun needed to load in. This of course is an exaggeration but its the thing we are hyper critical about and need to consider when we make the decisions that could have this kind of impact.

Its more than a few players, but I get your point. Even as devs we want to see big updates to the game. We're working on figuring out the right way to do it. Making progress on some things, holding off on others.

Our hopes honestly are for some things we release now to be able to tell us more about what to do in the future. An example here was the Random Gunskin feature. It didnt ship with the ability to favorite and randomize specific Variants, and the work between those was maybe a couple months? We felt that we didnt want to hold that back from players, despite it not being complete.

This is the beauty of live service to me at least, that we can ship something that adds value to everyone or at least doesnt take away from your experience, and make it better over time.

That's an idea that's been floated by both devs and players. I think it extends beyond just agents, and just comes down to player preference. Some players might want their loadout to match their agent in whatever way they feel is appropriate, some might just want their gold version one day and their red version another.
If we make one of those things true, we should also make the other true too

I wasnt aware this was a thing! did you report a bug?

Im right there with you. I look at other games and ask the same questions - what differentiates us (technologically)? Two games using unreal engine is very far from two games having similar capabilities, in fact most can tend to be incredibly different and are optimized for different things. Fortnite was built for large world, destruction, massive amounts of characters. Valorant was built for smaller maps, and incredibly high precision for competitiveness. What we do, fortnite cant, and vice versa. That's not an excuse, its just the reality. Eventually if we want to make additional features or improvements to the game, we'll need to solve some problems to help us get there. Understand we want the same things you do, and we're working to make it happen.

if we make that feature, we would do it for everything, not just knives.