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Recently, Valorant’s executive producer Anna 'SuperCakes' Donlon put up a video where she updated the fans on some of the changes that the game will be receiving in the coming months.
Anna explains that Valorant’s season will be divided into two episodes both containing 6 acts across the year.
In the video, she also says that “Episodes are meant to last about six months, with acts lasting about two months each. Agents will release at the beginning of an act, so if your math skills are awesome, you’ve figured out that we’re targeting about six agents a year.”
She even finishes her statement with a small glimpse of the new Agent’s silhouette, who will be released in Act 2.
Valorant Episode 01
Going down the same path as Overwatch
All in all, the Valorant fans are in for an exciting time, and new Agents would mean that the game will not get boring anytime soon.
But we can’t help but harbor a bit of apprehension about the plans that Anna has for Valorant’s future. It feels like the road that Overwatch went down ever since it’s release. Though the game isn’t exactly dead at the moment, the hype around it has gotten stale and died down significantly.
Much like Valorant, Overwatch too began with a small roster of Heroes, and each of them were incredibly unique and had their own personality. The game’s success prompted the developers to start releasing 3 Heroes every year, and soon the Overwatch roster got overcrowded.
However, for Valorant, Anna did assure us of “a little bit of flexibility,” in the sense that players get to decide how many Agents are too many or too few.
But the number of heroes are not the only concern in Overwatch. It’s also the type of heroes that are released and how they are absolutely capable of destroying not just the meta, but the game itself.
The GOATS Meta.
Remember when the Overwatch devs announced Brigitte as an answer to the Dive meta which made every game identical and was making Overwatch boring?
Well, instead of fixing the meta, Brigitte single-handedly broke it. She was a tanky support hero, who had a lot of crowd control buff abilities which could make her team unkillable.
And shortly after she was released there was one esports team who took full advantage of her and made her the game-breaking character that she later was known to be. GOATS shook up the North American open division with a strategy which many analysts came to call ‘The GOATS meta’.
The strategy involved the use of 3 tanks and 3 supports, making the entire squad an unkillable unit, and incredibly frustrating to play against.
The GOATS strategy became an instant success in the Overwatch League and all the teams started to pick them up. This resulted in long drawn and incredibly boring games, which plummeted the League’s viewership by several notches.
Players also started to leave as fun DPS heroes became a thing of the past, and the game wasn’t exactly fun anymore.
Hence, with the ‘6 Agents, a year’ schematic Riot too has very high chances of going that road with Valorant. The more Agents you release, the harder it gets to balance the meta.
