Riot Games on Valorant's competition, toxicity, and why 2020 isn't too late for a team-based shooter

Project A, one of several games announced in a wave of 10th anniversary fanfare at the end of 2019, is now officially called Valorant. It’s free-to-play, it’s releasing in Summer 2020, and as you might have read in our lengthy Valorant preview, it looks pretty slick.

That said, our hands-on time with the game threw up plenty of questions, too. The most obvious one: why a tactical shooter? And why now, so long after Overwatch, Rainbow Six and Counter Strike seemingly cornered the market?

Then there’s Riot’s unusual opening gambit, opting to lead with such a huge blast of technical info, and promises about stability and anti-cheating, over introducing us to the world of this game itself. What will the in-game purchases look like? And, after a decade of League of Legends, what has Riot learned about curbing its huge problem with toxicity?

We talked to lead producer Anna Donlon and game director Joe Ziegler about that and plenty more, with the two of them seemingly keen to cool any suggestions that Valorant is taking on its obvious competitors – as much as it may appear to be doing just that.

So, very high level to start with, you talked about this a bit already but when exactly was Valorant greenlit?

Anna Donlon: Yeah, so here’s what I’ll say. Riot’s approach to greenlighting games has been evolving the entire time this game was in R&D. So, “greenlit” is a hard concept for us to kind of get our heads around. Riot’s approach is: there’s a certain amount of commitment and investment that goes into the game once we decide we’re actually going to ship it. So there’s a certain expectation that the game is actually going to be a game worth shipping before making that investment. So when I look at traditional game development, like even kind of where I came from before here [Treyarch, one of the Call of Duty studios], there’s all these different phases for us. There were those phases, but there’s a moment where we were like, “yes, absolutely all in,” and our game was probably significantly further along than you’d expect.

Joe Ziegler: And further along than a lot of games, yeah.

AD: So, for us, what we will consider “full production” – fully all in – has been for the past year and a half. A year and a half now, probably more in a pre-production phase for a couple years before that, and then a very early R&D phase for a bit of time before that.