Riot Games’ Upcoming Valorant Won’t Have Loot Boxes
According to Riot Games, their upcoming 5v5 FPS won’t feature loot boxes. Valorant is avoiding the loot box craze by letting gamers purchase the cometic items they want directly, including skins, sprays and more. The team also intends to curb an old unfair advantage known as “peeker’s advantage” which is where a skilled gamer may use slight server latency to gain the upper-hand on their opponents. Valorant doesn’t have an official release date yet but Riot Games intends to release it on PC this year.
Not only will skins be directly purchasable, but according to executive producer Anna Donlon, some skins will also be upgradeable. Upgradeable skins in online shooters is nothing new though, with Fortnite being a well known example. Apparently when the game launches, Valorant will have a “couple of different progression systems.” Thankfully none of the cosmetics will affect gameplay and spending real money won’t impact your ability to play the game. The characters in Valorant are thankfully all designed to have the same hitbox and to be immediately recognizable from across the map so Riot Games doesn’t want to mess with this with the various systems.
“I think [character skins] would have to be in a way that there’s absolutely nothing to impact the gameplay,” said Anna Donlon. “It’ll be narrow. I think there’s a way to do that. And those are things that we’re interested in exploring.” While being able to buy skins directly is nothing new for gaming, it’s definitely a preferred system over loot boxes which are also known as surprise mechanics to some publishers.
Are you glad many games are putting the loot box trend behind them? What’s a skin that you proudly purchased in a game? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: Polygon