Valorant Dev Tracker

Hi there! Riot Torqued from Valorant's performance team here.

I wanted to share some insights into how we're approaching improving Valorant's performance. When talking about performance we don't just look at systems average fps, but also what is the minimum FPS that players see(how much fps is dropping by).

There's two broad ways we can improve this. We can either raise average FPS, so the minimum FPS you see is higher. For example, dropping from 180-> 140 would feel better than dropping from 140-100. The other thing we can do is optimize things that cause FPS to drop, so that the drops are lower.

Ultimately to achieve our performance goals we'll be focusing on making both kinds of improvements with success for us being measured by the minimum FPS that players see, not just the average.

We have a lot of changes going on in the 3.0 patch. The tough thing is, a lot of them interact with each other, so we need ALL of them ready to be worth shipping together. For example, let’s say we’re adjusting an agent’s number of charges on an ability as well as the cost of that ability. But, we’re also updating the weapon/ability economy pretty substantially. Shipping one of those in 2.11 and the other in 3.0 is kinda needlessly disruptive, and they’ve been tuned as a bundle internally; it’d make that agent just feel really weird for 2.11 or require us to shake up their costs again for the second patch in a row on 3.0 to feel correct. We’d like to avoid patterns like that if we can.

TL;DR is that we know it’s a bit disappointing to have empty updates like this, but we think it’ll lead to a better overall experience. 3.0 and 3.1 have a good clip of changes in them!

It’s been tough for us to make big changes balance-wise with Master’s going on until recently. The next two patches will be quite significant, though!

I can acknowledge that we know about it and are working on it.

We literally did take that feedback! Glad you noticed. :) Our audio designer is awesome and we talked about it. Forsaken’s Vandal has custom audio but some players thought it was hard to hear. He tuned the audio on Origin so it’s even more apparent than it was on Forsaken.

We always want to be careful with custom audio because some people will be very sensitive to it. We never want a player to pick up a gun, fire it, and not know what gun they’re using. We’re starting to see that our dev team is more sensitive to this stuff (a good thing!) and actually players do want more distinct audio than we expected. We never want stuff to feel pay-to-lose, so I’m glad we are pushing the bar in terms of the custom firing audio but doing it slowly and deliberately.

pairs well with the Ion bicycle seat

Hey, it's an opinion and that's always helpful to hear! :)

I love that you use the word FEEL. We use that word a lot too. It's not about the individual components of a skin but instead how it all comes together to feel like a fantasy.

We'd love to put 100% of features onto 100% of the guns but unfortunately when it really comes down to it, sometimes its one of 2 things:

A. We do something minor for a change and it doesnt get noticed, therefore its not worth. Waaay back when designing the original guns for Valorant we went through this problem where we tried to basically reinvent the wheel when it came to equips and reloads. We very quickly realized that theres only so many ways you can meaningfully equip or reload a gun without completely redesigning the mechanics of it (Prime is an example that id use of having a different reload mechanic). So what you're left with when it comes to those actions is like i mentioned subtle animation changes which go unnoticed, leaving most of the weight on visual effects and audio. Those are typically the areas where we'll try to go all out in a theme but then the counter to that is the default animation is the same so it feels less impactful. So its definitely a balanc...

That's great to hear. I'm honestly really excited to read through all the comments when I'm out of meetings. Sean Marino (oniram) really got a good discussion going! :D

We're always listening and reading. All the comments in this thread are really great insight.

I see pros inspect a ton in esports, but we've always wondered how much non-pros care about unique inspects.

No plans at the moment for another Ultra. Skins are hard to make, especially Ultras.