[2021] VALORANT Modes Team, AMA on Escalation and other game modes (10AM PT–11AM PT)

There are a bunch of modes were excited about that would require their own maps to play well. No immediate plans, but hopefully something we can deliver in the future.

hello! We talked about this a lot, and actually have a FFA prototype built - it's something we'd like to ship in the future! Couple reasons why we went team first:

1. When we create a mode, we target some specific goals that we feel the game's currently missing. For Escalation our goals were: a short, low stress, high uptime mode that's fun to play with your friends. The fun to play with friends part pushed us towards a team-based mode.
2. Gungame modes obviously inspired this mode, and we noticed how a lot of other gungames are presented as "team" modes, but they end up just being a FFA race - you don't care if your team wins, you only care how you individually place. We could have gone this direction, but we wanted to try something different and actually have some team goals, shared progression, and an endgame where the entire team comes together for a crazy fight with a tough weapon.

There are a bunch of modes were excited about that would require their own maps to play well. No immediate plans, but hopefully something we can deliver in the future.

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This likely won't be possible until we ship a FFA version of the mode due to the way our game modes currently work tech-wise. BUT yes, we'd like to ship a FFA version of this eventually.

Glad you're enjoying escalation! So player count is a weird one - we did some testing of 7v7 and it definitely upped the pace on the game. Some people really liked it, some people thought it made an already chaotic mode too chaotic. I felt pretty neutral either way, but the reason we ended up shipping 5v5 was mainly due to party sizes. A 7v7 would present one social problem: you queue up with your 5 stack between games, and now you get 2 randos attached to your team and no longer have full agency of the result of the game. And if we wanted to allow people to queue as 7 there would be a ton of client work to do and it would have caused us to delay this mode longer than we wanted to. 7v7 would also present a tech problem: assembling a team of 7 is harder for the matchmaker than assembling a team of 5, and we weren't sure how healthy the queue would be for this mode, so we were worried about creating long queue times with teams of 7.

We generally set out with a set of goals in mind, but we've done some "blue sky" explorations as well. For Escalation, we definitely knew we wanted "gun game" and some light team coordination.

There are several modes that are "on ice" for now. Not scrapped, because we may pull them back, even just in part, for the future. I'm super excited about redacted.

We plan to have a robust ecosystem for modes someday and daily rotations could certainly be a part of it.

hahaha so you're saying you saw through my "just make the knife bigger and hit harder and make you go zoom" approach?

Yeah - we know the knife is not in a great state as it is. Some of the key issues from our perspective are reliability, hit satisfaction, and situational viability. We've got ideas on how to improve each of these areas but unfortunately couldn't get them in in time to ship with this mode. This is something we'd really like to do in the future, it's just a question of when makes the most sense to do it. There is an argument to do it to ship alongside this mode, but it probably would have added a month or so to the dev time for this mode and the rest of the mode was ready so it felt wrong to hold it and we felt that "BIG KNIFE" worked as a silly bandaid to make knife round at least bearable if not good.

Hello! So the way levelling works is a bit tricky:

1. Your team needs 7 points to move on to the next level. Current level kills give 1 point, previous level kills give .5 points.
2. You (individually) need 1 kill to move on to the next level.

If your team moves on before you've gotten a kill, you'll be left behind until you get a kill, at which point you'll auto-advance.

Hey!

We're consistently evaluating how we'll be bringing back temporary modes in the future. Escalation (and Snowball Fight) are part of the Custom Game mode selector when the mode is active!

CONFIRMED CRUSH BREEZE IS NOW ON CHARACTERS TEAM

Big knife.

This was a big reason we went with the team approach. We absolutely understand the desire and enjoyment of a FFA Gun Game, but Valorant's mode ecosystem need a high uptime, low stress mode that can be played socially with friends and we felt that this approach was surprisingly fun.

This mode has single handedly improved my skill with the Marshall to the point that it's one of my favorite weapons in the game now.

This is a great question! The way we currently operate involves two parallel streams:

One stream is prototypes. Basically at the very beginning of our team we did a ton of brainstorming, both as a team and individually. We noted down modes we loved in other shooters and we talked about funny/crazy mechanics from our game we'd like to isolate & expand on. From there, over the past year-ish (our team is still pretty young), various people on the team have actually built out these prototypes. We've tested some pretty wild modes that really push systems in the game as they currently exist, and I can't wait for those modes to be closer to shippable :)

The other stream is product goals. As a team we feel like there's still a lot of room in the game for modes, so if we sat around prototyping for our entire existence we'd never ship ya'll any modes. So, we identify the most pressing needs in VALORANT as a whole and come up with a list of goals, and the types of players those goals would serve, and we use those goals to decide which mode we ship next. Sometimes that's a prototype we've already built, sometimes we build something new if none of them fit. If you look at what we've built so far it should be pretty clear the goals of each one - spike rush was our way to show players the "core" of VALORANT in a shorter setting with a bit less stress. Deathmatch was our mode to get fast reps on weapons for as long or short as players want. Snowball and now Escalation have both been looking to create a short higher uptime mode that provides opportunities for social play with friends.

has anyone seen my bigger knife

As the Best Spike Rusher in NA, I agree that I would do very well at this mode. My taped down W key would be even more powerful.

This isn't something we have explored, but I am personally a huge fan of this. I am a fan of randomized engagement and would absolutely use this

Great question! Yeah so we all know in VALORANT "you don't kill with abilities". But for Escalation we specifically were looking for only the abilities that could do just that :D And furthermore we upped the damage on almost all of them - this was necessary because the ability levels felt almost impossible, especially if you got stuck on them - getting a kill with a shock dart that does like 90 max damage if everyone else has guns is basically impossible. So I ended up roughly doubling damage on all the abilities other than raze ult.

ANYWAYS - we started by looking at all abilities that could realistically secure kills. There actually aren't that many - it's basically Raze's kit, shock dart, mollies, a set of ultis, and then some weird ones that TECHNICALLY could kill you but never should like a cypher trap or killjoy turret. We picked out the ones that felt diverse and like they'd be the most fun, and then I did some frankenstein work to allow all agents to use them. I ran into some crazy technical issues on a few of them, and others like jett ult / brim ult / sova ult ended up looking like a ton of work after finishing the work on raze's ult. So we ended up with the set we have now. We're definitely open to expanding this set if the mode is successful and we leave it on longer-term.

A golden gun focused mode would be fun... 🤔

Sorta answered here

oh man some of the internal playtests on redacted have been so hype, can't wait to see players get a redacted and transition it into a double redacted so the redacted gets redacted.

So the intention is that it's roughly strong (very lethal) to weak (not very lethal), with some randomization. The randomization does allow for some relative deviation from that lethality - sometimes you'll see light weapons & pistols ordered with a weaker one before a stronger one - that's intentional currently, but something we'd be open to iterating on if people don't like it. The alternative would be to basically have a hard-set strength rating of each weapon and never let a weaker weapon show up before a stronger weapon - but I'd worry that would become stale quicker.

What are your thoughts on how it works now? Would you want it to be more true to the strong -> weak curve, or more random? Would you like to see it sometimes go weak to strong, sometimes full random, sometimes strong to weak? These are all options we considered and things we could do in the future, we just felt like strong->weak with some randomization felt best for this team-based version of the mode.

As someone not on characters team who also loves viper, I think we make her ulti continuously expand until it envelopes the entire map and last multiple rounds and it can only be cleared if jett uses her wind dashy abilities to clear the air, would be a double buff to jett and viper at the same time, good way to funnel some of jett's power to help the team too. And then later on maybe we make an agent who has big fan and can fan away the smoke

ayyy we spellbreak now poison + fire gauntlet combo is nasty

2 teams would end up creating a lot of work across our entire stack, we have a lot of assumptions that there are maximum two teams. The work we did for deathmatch makes this a bit easier but it's still a ways off. We do want multi team modes at some point, but the cost to get multi team working means the mode will need to really call for it, and escalation didn't.