The lore and history behind Valorant explained

Riot Games' Valorant just released a few moments ago and it has already created a lot of hype among the gaming community. Despite the stunning visuals and the fluid gameplay of Valorant, there is one more factor that some players look onto before playing the actual game. It is the lore or the history of the game.

Riot Games specialize at making the lore of games they develop and has been pretty successful at it too. While League of Legends has its big expansive lore, Valorant has one for itself as well.

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When asked about the lore and storyline by the community, Riot Games replied as:

"In the world of Valorant, a diverse cast of hypernatural, battle-ready agents from across the world have come together to respond to a larger existential threat, with catastrophic, world-altering consequences on the line."

Image Credit: Riot Games

"At the moment the game launches, there is a related event that is an existential threat to life on Earth. Sites around the world (our game maps) are at the center and play an important part in this threat."

“VALORANT is a secretive organization that has assembled a cast of diverse agents from across the world to come together and respond to this threat. These are the best at what they do and they’re battle ready. They come from all different backgrounds. Some have military background, some may be criminals. Some may have fought together in a past life and have an existing friendship. Others may have fought on opposite sides and have profound conflict. But they all must come together to fight because this external threat is bigger than their differences." (Credit-Joe Ziegler, Game Director of VALORANT at Riot Games)

This clarifies a lot of theories about the lore of Valorant and it would be interesting to see how the developers take it to the next level in case of narration in the game. It is a totally different universe or lore than League of Legends but do expect Easter eggs giving in-game league references like the Scuttle snack store in Valorant maps.

As we stated earlier, Riot Games already have expansive lore of their successful MOBA game that is League of Legends. The community wanted to know about their inspiration for the lore behind Valorant.

"The world of Valorant is a wholly separate world from League of Legends. For a long time we toyed with the idea of Valorant being incorporated into the world of Runeterra, utilizing familiar spaces and characters, but we found it difficult to reconcile key aspects that made Runeterra such an amazing and iconic world with key aspects of our game. Our game had physical, weighty guns that fired like real life weaponry and our abilities were not designed to dominate the battlefield over these guns. In other words, guns are the star of the show in Valorant and in Runeterra, magic is the star of the show. We didn’t want to do an injustice to fans of the world of League of Legends by forcibly trying to make it conform to our needs." (Credit-Joe Ziegler, Game Director of Valorant at Riot Games)

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When is the Valorant Lore going to expand?

Image Credit: Riot Games

This question is still under debate within the community. But Riot Games pointed out their plan of the lore in Valorant as:

We want players to feel really connected to the agents they choose to play. Exposing players to the agent backstories, as well as the backstory of this world they are fighting in, can be a really cool way to deepen that connection. We’re excited to see what the community’s appetite for lore/story is for Valorant. The timeline for when we start doing this and how often is still being worked out. (Credit-Anna Donlon, Executive Producer of Valorant at Riot Games)

That is fabulous news for the fans who are desperately waiting for the storyline/narrative of the game and we hope it will be a fun experience for gamers all around the world.