Riot Games is well aware of the comparisons that people sometimes draw between Valorant and rival shooters CS:GO and Overwatch, but the team believes “that’s a surface-level comparison to make.”
Valorant has been out on PC for four years now, offering players a blend of tactical shooter action with hero shooter-like elements thanks to its playable Agents and their unique abilities. With that description alone, you can see why some would argue that it sits somewhere in the middle of Blizzard and Valve‘s own offerings, and in an interview GamesRadar+, Riot Games’ director of production and product lead for Valorant, Arnar Hrafn Gylfason, admits “it’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”
Gylfason says: “I think it’s an easy correlation to draw, because, hey, it has heroes, and it’s a tactical shooter.” However, it’s not a comparison he likes using, for multiple reasons.
“I think we feel like that’s a surface-level comparison to make,” he continues. “We feel like we are definitely our own flavor. We are our own identity. And we don’t like comparing to other games… I don’t think it’s fair to other games, I don’t think it’s fair to what Valorant has become.
“I think it’s more a question of, again, what motivations are we serving, what player motivations are we serving, and what kind of gameplay fantasy are we providing those players? Which is slightly more nuanced, but that’s not the first time I’ve heard that comparison, no.”
In the same interview, Gylfason tells us that Riot doesn’t “think of [Valorant] as a hero shooter,” which plays into the developer’s confidence in launching the FPS on consoles now, even though the genre has been getting increasingly more crowded lately. Gylfason believes Valorant “scratches a different itch than the kind of hero action shooters that we’ve been seeing in this space for the past few years,” with different games serving “different needs” and “player motivations,” leading him to believe that “there’s room for all.”