A while ago I wrote a piece about Valorant and why I liked its take on the genre… but eventually, I ended up regretting that entirely as Valorant turned out to be like all other games in the genre… but potentially worse.
You see, what I liked about Valorant was the simplified art style and the satisfying gunplay. It’s a CSGO-like game where the user has abilities that allow you to block off areas or block off vision or maybe even fly through the air and dash around and stuff. It’s new for me to enjoy games like that but at the time during the closed beta, I really enjoyed playing it…
Once it was fully out and accessible to everyone and anyone, however, I noticed that there’re two faults with the game:
- abilities
- the community
Riot Games themselves said that abilities wouldn’t overshadow the gunplay by any means. They would enhance the experience and change how you play the game… but they would not matter as much as skill and the guns in the game… but then they released Raze and suddenly I didn’t enjoy the game as much anymore. Don’t get me wrong, Raze may not be overpowered anymore but she’s a complete contradiction to what Riot Games said about their own game… Raze featured three abilities that could one-shot enemies and one ability that gave her some mobility and enough damage to kill enemies in two shots, using two charges. I didn’t like that at all. Why do abilities suddenly matter so much?
I mean, Sage’s heals are quite strong in this game since there isn’t that much healing involved, but Sage doesn’t have direct damage in her kit. Other characters have mobility and vision control or can crowd-control enemies… Viper, one of my favourite characters, utilizes poison damage and controllable vision barricades, but she felt really balanced. Her poison wouldn’t one-shot you or anything like that.
So, abilities matter a lot suddenly and characters end up being overpowered on release with some of the later character releases having a lot of self-healing and just sitting at a 100% pick-rate.
The other point is that the community is super toxic, especially with voice chat being a thing. A reason for why I stopped playing Overwatch was the community’s levels of toxicity… but Valorant is nearly as bad as Overwatch and CS:GO in those regards. The quality of some people’s microphones is horrendous. At the same time, some of them are just being racist, bigoted, homophobic or harmful in a lot of ways because you can’t punish them for it without recording them or whatever… I had this one guy scream at me for a whole game because I refused to heal him. Then he’d tell me that I sucked and that I’m the worst player in the game. He started shouting into the microphone when I said that him dying first every round contradicts me being the worst player. I mean, he’d probably be right about me sucking at Valorant. I’m not very good at shooter games after all… but if he wants to get healed, he shouldn’t insult people, so I just refused to heal him in particular.
Of course, you can mute people in the games and you can ignore everyone and all of that… but… I don’t see a point in there being Voice Chat if you don’t use it. Playing with friends would be a solution to fix the issues I had with Valorant… but none of my friends actually play the game anymore because abilities are just so overpowered.
Apart from that, I also noticed that people who are good at Valorant aren’t really good at CS:GO… but people that are very good in CS:GO are just god-like in Valorant. Hence, I feel like you can’t play the game as a newbie without getting stomped every game by some guy who’s just godlike or smurfing or whatever. It feels silly how often games are completely one-sided or where one player is the only good one…
And of course, I could get super good at it by playing a lot of it and whatnot… but I don’t enjoy it that much really and I don’t have fun at it anymore, which is why I figured: Hey, I should make a post about this because I posted about liking Valorant before… and I don’t really like it anymore. I don’t play Hyperscape either, btw, for similar reasons… and yeah, there’s a statement on that, I guess.
Do you guys play Valorant? If so, wanna play it together? :P
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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