The VALORANT Closed Beta launch couldn’t have gone much better
By Ty Brody
VALORANT, the highly anticipated first-person shooter from Riot Games, made its Closed Beta debut on Tuesday night – breaking Twitch records in the process.
Last week, we learned about Riot Games’ plans to begin a Closed Beta testing period for their highly-anticipated tactical first-person shooter, VALORANT. News regarding the game, its closed beta, or the widespread excitement circling it would have been tough to miss over the past week, with some of the biggest names in gaming and esports interested in VALORANT.
On Friday, Riot Games’ released captured gameplay from streamers and professional players that were invited to test the game out for themselves prior to release. That gameplay was streamed to Twitch, where Twitch Drops granted access to the Closed Beta to those lucky enough to claim one.
VALORANT dominated Twitch for the day, along with any media concerning computer gaming. At one point, VALORANT was being viewed by 997,000 hopeful players, each awaiting Closed Beta access in the form of a Twitch Drop.
Riot Games has unquestionably hit the launch of VALORANT out of the park. The best part? The game actually lives up to the hype. After playing the Closed Beta on Tuesday afternoon, I quickly noticed just how polished and streamlined the game was for only being in its beta.
From map design to character trait balancing, to the game’s performance with things like frame rate and network latency. VALORANT has provided an especially refreshing experience to those making their way over from titles such as Counter-Strike, Overwatch, and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds.
We’ve yet to learn details regarding an official launch date, although Riot Games’ did originally state ‘Summer 2020’ when the game was first announced late last year. Still, timelines for almost every upcoming event, gaming industry nonexempt, have been drastically affected by the ongoing global pandemic of COVID-19.
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What we can say is VALORANT is sure to be a title you’ll continue to hear about for the foreseeable future. Absent some catastrophic failure within the offices at Riot, this title already delivers on the major issues plaguing online competitive player’s in-game experience. Including, server tick-rate, frames per second, anti-cheat software, bullet registration, network latency, and ‘peeker’s advantage’ — all of which were areas Riot promised to address long before the launch of this Closed Beta.
Moving forward, VALORANT will continue to undergo it’s Closed Beta testing, with more and more players receiving access each day. This will be interesting to keep an eye on as more players flood the servers, the likelihood of overloading the servers becomes greater. Already on Day 1 of the Closed Beta release, VALORANT was forced to acknowledge an issue with servers, which effected the accessibility for eager players.
Day 1 of Closed Beta has been incredible but humbling as we scale our servers. For now, we have to pause stream drops until tomorrow morning (PT). We'll let you know as soon as they're back. We hear your questions and concerns about CB access and will clarify as soon as we can.
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) April 8, 2020
If you haven’t received Closed Beta access, be sure to check out the story from last week explaining exactly how you can get in on the excitement. And stay tuned to App Trigger for much more coverage of VALORANT.