Riot Games officially unveils new shooter Valorant and first characters

• Valorant has been officially announced by Riot Games in a new trailer
• It marks the developer's first FPS title, appearing to borrow heavily from Valve's CS:GO
• Riot has announced the first eight characters from the title

Formerly titled Project A, new shooter Valorant marks a significant departure for developer Riot Games – who have built their name on MOBA League of Legends and strategy titles like Teamfight Tactics.  

While we previously only knew it was a “character-based tactical shooter”, Riot has dropped a bunch of details about the new title – including the first eight characters.  

Valorant is a free-to-play shooter with five-on-five teams, consisting of 25 round matches with the first team to take 13 rounds winning the match.  

The main mode in Valorant is similar to CS:GO’s Defuse mode, whereby an attacking team has to plant a bomb on one of several different sites, while the defending team has to prevent them from doing so.  

Aesthetically, it looks like a hybrid of CS:GO and Overwatch – with each character possessing special abilities like teleportation, wall building and toxic clouds.  

Riot also announced details of the first eight characters (officially called 'Agents'), named Omen, Sage, Brimstone, Sova, Cypher, Viper, Jett and Phoenix.  

• Read more: Valorant: Agents and Abilities Guide

Much like Overwatch, Riot are emphasizing diversity in their cast of agents; described as “battle-ready agents from real-world cultures and locations, each bringing a set of unique abilities that compliment gunplay through tactical information and strategic support, changing the way players approach a situation”. 

Valorant is Riot's first play into the FPS realm (Picture: Riot Games) 

Each character has a mix of abilities, ranging from a main ability you can use automatically in each round, purchaseable abilities bought from the store at the beginning of each round, and an ultimate ability which becomes available after earning kills or completing objectives.  

In the technical details, Riot is promising “128-tick servers, at least 30 frames per second on most min-spec computers (even dating back a decade), 60 to 144 FPS on modern gaming rigs, a global spread of datacenters aimed at <35ms for players in major cities around the world," along with a strong netcode and a commitment to anti-cheat from the get-go. 

There's plans for a closed beta of Valorant in the future, although there’s no details as to when this will happen.  

You won’t have long to wait though, with Valorant scheduled to be released summer 2020 on PC.