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Valorant, Riot's new FPS, is coming this summer

Riot's Project A now has a name, but more than that, Valorant also has a release window. It's set to release this summer!

Ozzie Mejia

March 2, 2020 12:08 AM

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Late last year, we learned that Riot Games had a lot of games on its plate. Among the titles on the League of Legends developer's docket was a 5v5 first-person shooter, similar to Valve's Counter-Strike and Blizzard's Overwatch, that was only known as Project A. Late Sunday evening, Riot officially pulled the curtain back on Project A, showing off first gameplay footage for the newly-dubbed Valorant. It's also coming sooner than some might think, with a Summer 2020 release window attached.

As the clock struck midnight on the west coast, Riot unveiled a short, roughly three-minute internal developer playtest of Valorant on the game's new YouTube channel. The footage reveals what appears to be an amalgamation of Valve and Blizzard's flagship shooters. Players can see a mixture of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's gunplay and user interface and Overwatch's focus on characters and signature abilities. On top of shotguns and sniper rifles, players were witness to various special abilities, such a super jump, a harmful area-of-effect fog, and gadgets that offered a bird's-eye view of the surrounding area. The objective looked to be similar to Counter-Strike's typical gameplay, with one team on offense looking to defuse a "spike" and the other team on defense seeking to stop them.

Sommer 2020
2020 여름
Лето 2020 pic.twitter.com/A7BnCpGhFV

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) March 2, 2020

Information about Valorant first began trickling in over the weekend, with esports guru Rod "Slasher" Breslau observing on Twitter that Riot had activated Twitter and Twitch accounts tied to the game's new moniker. This was followed shortly by Breslau pointing to a leak from IGN that showed off some of the game's early screenshots.

Even with the name change, very little is known about Valorant. When first announced back in October, Riot called it a "character-based tactical shooter set in a near-future Earth," indicating that it will be totally separate from the League of Legends franchise. Among the unknowns are the platforms that the game will be gracing, though one assumes that it will hit PC on day one. We'll have more information on the former Project A as it comes in, but in the meantime, check out the all-new Valorant website.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?