[2020] Elderflame skins discussion

what hits your "oh sh*t, thats cool" button?

I'll hold off on giving any additional info than whats in the video for now. They'll be live in the store soon and hopefully being able to scroll between the base weapon and the skin version can show the weapon silhouette similarities

Like with Prime and Sovereign so far, we always make sure that if you dont want to have the crazy anims, vfx or audio, you can always purchase the skin and not opt into the upgrades that give you those features. the hope here is that things are also not distracting to the point where if you pick up someone's lv4 gun skin it doesnt take a toll on your experience.

no love for the phantom? :P

that totally makes sense. and no worries - its fine to compare to CS when it comes to skin quality or preferences, the main differentiation there that we have to learn and understand from is what do players like because of taste, and what do they like because of rarity or exclusivity.

we currently have buckets of skin categories that we use to figure out what to make next, and ill give you a little example of what sorts of things go through our minds when coming up with a skin idea.

Generally when thinking about skins we always think about what "genre" or "bucket" can we put something into. A lot of "CS Style" skins where you get a pretty wrapper or painting on your gun, we'd typically consider fitting into an Artistic bucket. There could be some potential spillover into other categories though.

Say we look at doing a techy looking skin thats got like scifi paneling and such and its purely just a texture wrapper on the base gun - something looked like district 9 inspired or something like that. the question we have to ask ourselves in this scenario is "are we burning an idea that could have more potential."

for the player who really wants to dive into that scifi fantasy thematic, compared to some other skins that have more features or do cooler things when upgraded, that player may be missing out or feel like they didnt get the thing that they wanted to express their interests the way some other players did. so we have to find the right opportunities and decide where to go all in on a skin, or not.

Our team likes to push the boundaries and challenge the convention of what skins could be or what they have been known to be. We dont to camos or "simple" things because what we've seen and heard from players is that they value effort, so we always want to show that we're putting effort into something so someone feels like its worth engaging with.

Bringing this all back to retextures and/or artistic skins. We know players want this and we're absolutely working to ensure that we can get some of that to you, it just honestly wasn't our initial priority because of how focused we were on pushing the bar.

For VALORANT, the brand/tone generally has a fresh and bold artistic vibe and we know we can lean on to bring simpler, cleaner content to the game. We definitely aim to have a balance of content that meets the needs of players who want something that's more in the realm of stylish and tasteful, vs wanting to dive into a full alternate fantasy, so expect to see more of that in the future.

Totally understandable - its certainly a disconnect from the typical mechanical functioning weapon to now being a creature, but you're right its something that is just for a specific set of people. we want to make sure everyone can get something to express themselves and their likes. over time as we have more and more guns, buddies, sprays and cards, we'll reach that point where we've released enough that we at least have something for everyone. we'll get there :)