VALORANT Riot Devs Talk Future Changes & Power of Duelists
On the game when it comes to the balance the guns the agents the general gameplay we talk about various stuff:
Astra the new agent the new changes to viper and euro we also talk about future balance changes that could be coming certainly to some duelists but also some initiators as well like i said there’s a couple of parts introductions are always nice just to know exactly who people should be shouting at i suppose when it comes to game balancer.
Viper’s identity changed since astra’s edition i do feel that when you have omen and brimstone competing with viper for a spot things were getting better for viper right we saw her a little bit more in first strike on ice buck she’s used a bit but i can’t help but think with astra her and omen are going to be duking out for the most part with pick rate and viper yet again is going to lose like a chunk of the ground that she’s made so with her addition how are you seeing viper going forward because i guess it can be quite easy to adjust the agent to be a bit more well-rounded i supposed to be able to play on every map but i quite like and i think a lot of people like the viper is a niche pick so i wondered with astra’s edition if your idea on where viper should be has changed at all or do you see her as a niche pick yeah i think that’s a great question i think in general we think of her as a little bit more of a niche pick i think a huge component of this is our current map pool.
I think what viper brings to the table you know there’s a bunch of she’s a bunch of really powerful tools that do very specific jobs but i think on our current map pool those tools are not necessarily as flexible as some of the other characters that you know she’s often picked uh instead of right you know i think that our current maps have a lot of spots where hey if you can just get one smoke in this spot or one smoke in that spot that’s kind of all you need whereas viper’s real strength is is this kind of like territory control and this like really long wall that can block probably the most angles in the game but it’s not um as flexible right you put it down once and like that’s where your wall is uh i think a lot of our maps the way they play out that just is not as critical um i think our hope is that you know as time goes on and the map pool expands you’ll start seeing people pick different agents based on the maps i think.
We’ve already seen that a little bit with icebox i think as we come out with more and more maps you know every subsequent map’s always going to be you know we’re trying to make them reasonably different and ask players to solve different challenges and so hopefully a character like viper the unique set of tools that she brings is something that is very viable on some of those maps i think on icebox you know we’ve seen that already you know there’s teams that are pretty much only running viper on icebox.
On know that’s something that personally you know we’re very happy to see something like that it’s like hey this map asks a different type of challenge of players with a different set of geometry different type of mid different type of bomb sites maybe these other agents are actually far more effective when they need to conquer this type of space um so yeah i think that with regards to astra um and like how viper fits in i think that we haven’t really changed how we thought about viper.
