One of the most successful games as a service currently is Valorant, which gathers millions of players per month, especially after the arrival of Riot Games’ hero shooter on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. However, it seems that the company has ambitious plans for its video game that involve “new gameplay experiences“, and one of them has to do with the challenging task of changing the game engine while users continue playing matches.
A few hours ago, the director of the Valorant studio, Anna Donlon, commented at Unreal Fest a series of changes that are coming to the multiplayer hero shooter. The first and most important one has to do with the technical aspect, and we are talking about the very likely transition from Unreal Engine 4 to the fifth and latest version of the game engine. “We have literally squeezed everything we could out of Unreal 4, so now we move to Unreal Engine 5. It’s not an easy feat when it’s a game as a service, but it is necessary without a doubt,” she says (via VGC).
Valorant will transition to Unreal Engine 5
The Riot Games executive points out that there won’t be major changes visually in Valorant at the moment, which accumulates 35 million players per month. “And this update is not going to significantly change the look or performance of Valorant, at least not immediately, but this is what I can say. There are many developers at Riot who are incredibly grateful for what Unreal has allowed us to do for players, and there are many others who are excited about what UE5 can do for us in the future,” she explains.
“Perhaps those developers are working on something I cannot talk about. Perhaps they are thinking of ways to expand the Valorant universe with new playable experiences. Maybe we will feel very lucky to have everything that Unreal Engine 5 can offer us at our disposal and maybe we will be very happy that, by choosing Unreal for Valorant, we can move our developers, our technology, and everything else with great ease to explore those hypothetical new gameplay experiences,” she concludes.
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