Valorant On Controller Could Feel As Good As Mouse And Keyboard
Riot Games faced a big challenge when it started thinking about bringing its hit tactical shooter, Valorant, to console. The essential part was maintaining the same feel that Valorant has on PC so that, regardless of the machine you’re playing on, you’re getting what Riot considers to be the definitive Valorant experience. Because of the major differences between PC and console inputs–specifically the fact that playing a shooter with a mouse and playing a shooter with a controller require completely separate skill sets–that meant Riot had to adapt the console experience to make the two feel as similar as possible.
Ahead of the announcement of a Valorant console edition at Summer Game Fest 2024, Riot invited journalists and influencers to its studio in Los Angeles to play the new version, both to show the game off to the community and to gather feedback from Valorant die-hards to make sure it felt right. We played around three hours of Valorant during the event, and though I’m by no means a Valorant regular, my impression was that Riot’s work to find ways to make Valorant’s controls feel as tight and precise as they do on PC were pretty successful.
That was the essential element, as production director Arnar Gylfason explained in an interview with GameSpot, and there was a time when Riot wasn’t sure if it could get it right.