Riot Games faced a big challenge when it started thinking about bringing its hit tactical shooter, Valorant, to the console. The main part was keeping the same feel that Valorant has on PC, so that no matter which machine you play on, you get what Riot considers to be the definitive Valorant experience. Due to the vast differences between PC and console inputs – specifically the fact that playing a shooter with a mouse and playing a shooter with a controller require completely separate skill sets – this meant that Riot had to adapt the console experience to make the two feel as similar as possible.
Ahead of the announcement of a console release of Valorant at Summer Game Fest 2024, Riot invited journalists and influencers to its studio in Los Angeles to play the new version, both to showcase the game to the community and to gather feedback from Valorant fans to make sure it feels exactly. We played about three hours of Valorant during the event, and while I’m by no means a regular Valorant player, my impression was that Riot’s work to find ways to make Valorant’s controls feel as tight and precise as they do on PC, was quite successful.
That was the core element, as production director Arnar Gilfasson explained in an interview with GameSpot, and there was a time when Riot wasn’t sure if they could get it right.
“There were so many ways that if it didn’t work out, we had to say we can’t make this game for a console if we can solve this problem,” Gilfason said.
The stakes were so high both for what Valorant stands for and for the community that plays it. Valorant is the game people embrace seriously–unlike more arcade shooters like Fortnite or Call of Duty, Valorant’s experience is much less casual. As a tactical shooter, the emphasis is on smart plays and anticipation, because in any fight, one or two shots are almost always enough to take you out. Most matches are about attacking or defending territory, so losing a teammate due to poor play or slow reaction can be devastating to your side’s chances of victory. Valorant is a high-skill game whose focus is on being highly competitive, and that means the game’s controls need to be reliable, whether you’re aiming with a mouse or an analog stick.
In addition to fast and deadly gunplay, Valorant mixes hero shooter elements, with a huge cast of heroes, each with their own special abilities. So in addition to anticipating player locations, locking down angles and coordinating with your team, you’ll also have opponents’ abilities to contend with and counter.
As Gylfason explained, the problem is that on console it can be difficult to do everything Valorant asks of you with the traditional way shooters handle their controls.
“The biggest [challenge] so how do you solve this problem in Valorant that you have to be able to be very quick in looking around and evaluating a scenario – swinging like a 50/50 angle where you have to check left and check right very quickly or shoot with an ability , which has fallen right behind you, and then turn around and kill the agent who shot it,” Gilfason said. “But then you also have to be able to hit a pixelated headshot really far on a moving target.”
When you play Valorant with a mouse, you can do these things – big mouse movements make your character move big, but you can still get the precision of aim that’s essential to kill an opponent before they can hit you download With controllers, these huge differences can be more difficult, and in many shooters the experience can often include situations where a player who turns quickly will spin past their target and then have to go back to correct themselves. In Valorant, this would make the experience extremely frustrating.
Riot’s answer to this problem was to create an additional aiming mode called focus mode, sort of a half-step between shooting from the hip and pointing a crosshair. When you pull the left trigger on Valorant’s default settings, you go into focus mode, which narrows your view of your gun a bit and switches you to a more precise aiming sensitivity. The idea here is that you can set one pan sensitivity, one focus sensitivity, and one ad sensitivity, allowing you to get the precision you need.
In practice, the focus mode system works well to balance your ability to take in your surroundings quickly with the need to hit a headshot in an instant. It tightens your view without completely sacrificing your situational awareness like you might if you were aiming down, and Riot lets you adjust the sensitivity for the different aiming modes so you can get just the right feel and precision from each one. And while my experience with Valorant on PC is, as I mentioned, somewhat limited, on console I didn’t feel like I was playing any inferior approximation of the PC game or that I was struggling with the controls or constantly struggling to compensate for overshooting my aim , when I’m trying to quickly address a threat somewhere else.
Gylfason also said another part of the battle is that Riot can’t just port Valorant to console like it is on PC and be done with it. The differences in controls make small but subtle changes to the whole experience in ways you might not expect, so Riot had to tweak various little things to ensure that console and PC I felt the same, even if things are a little different behind the scenes.
“One specific thing, for example, is when you think about the action of incoming abilities that you have to deal with, say, Reyna Leer [ability], or Sova darts, or Gekko ability, or whatever. What it really does is it forces the player to make a choice: “Do I deal with the ability by letting it go, do I hide, or do I delete the ability and try to make the commitment?” Gilfason said. The setting for this is how hard is it to kill this ability or dispel this ability? What it really requires of you is to make a choice about what you are doing right now. And dealing with that threat to mitigate something, it takes you a while to look out of the corner, deal with the ability, and then look back into the corner.”
“And that break should be the same, but that doesn’t mean the settings have to be the same on PC and console,” he continued. “So does it take the same amount of bullets to shoot Reyna Leer on console and PC? No, but it takes about the same amount of distraction to deal with it and bring it back. So, the settings are such that they are important to us. It would be really simple to transfer one to one, but then it wouldn’t serve the purpose we were meant to serve.”
Making sure the controls feel good isn’t the only element of the console game that Riot is focusing on. Performance is also an important part of the situation, and to keep console players from feeling like they’re getting a worse competitive experience than players on powerful PCs, Riot is aiming for a solid 120 FPS across all consoles. There is no cross-play between PC and other platforms, Gylfason said. Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 players will find themselves in the same lobbies, but will never face off against PC players. Likewise, Riot uses its anti-cheat software to keep mouse and keyboard players out of console lobbies, so when you start a game of Valorant with a controller in hand, you’ll know you’re on a level playing field with everyone else in the match.
Your stats are also split by platform, Gylfason said, so if you’re pulling great kill/death ratios when playing on PS5, you won’t have to worry about those numbers being wiped out if you decide you want to give a mouse and computer keyboard shot.
Console players should also have the same experience as PC players when it comes to connection speed and server access.
“Once you’re in Valorant, you’re in Valorant — you’re playing on the same infrastructure, the same network code, the same servers that PC players are playing on,” Gylfason said. “You’re not going through layers of anything else, you’re connected to Riot’s infrastructure. So our hope is also that we can build on that experience and investment that we’ve made over the last couple of years on PC by delivering it directly to console players from day one.”
While there is no cross-play between PC and console, there is cross-progression. As on PC, the console version of Valorant is free to play and your account is shared between all the platforms you can use. This means that any skins or cosmetic items you purchase or unlock on PC will come with you to console and vice versa.
“It was important for us to respect the player’s investment in the game,” Gilfasson said. “No matter what platform they’re playing on, whether that investment is time spent or money invested, that should be honored and respected, no matter where you’re coming from.”
Riot is running a limited beta test for Valorant on console starting June 14 in the US, Canada, Europe, UK, and Japan, with the possibility of a global beta release after that. You can sign up or learn more on Riot’s website at beta.playvalorant.com.
