The awaited Riot’s entry to the FPS game to rival the likes of Counter-Strike and Overwatch will be hitting our hands soon as this summer. As the days of the countdown comes to closer, more and more details of what we can expect are being reported. The League of Legends developers understands that, for fastpaced games like FPS, latency and reaction time is at the peak of every gamer’s list. With this in mind, the company is dishing out dollars to build technology to minimize this problem among its upcoming player base.
David Straily, the senior software engineer of the formerly named Project A, emphasized that Valorant‘s main objective is on the competitive strength. Behind every mouse one click, the developers want the trust of pro and casual players alike to record their actions fairly and correctly. “Competitive integrity is that for every single game you play, whether you win or you lose, you are in control of that outcome,” the software engineers say. “Our game is hard to get really good at, but it’s fair. That’s the guarantee through and through.” He also added that the engineering team’s obstacle is for players not to think about the technical side of the game; be it the frames-per-second, latency, or hit registration.
The game’s servers play a considerable role in this dream to come true. The industry standard 64 tick servers, such as Valve’s CS: GO. The tick rate describes how often the server and a player’s computer communicate with each other for the match. Riot promises 128 tick servers for everyone for free on their new FPS game. This technology means that the server refresh happens twice as much as Valve’s counterpart. Anna Donlon, Valorant‘s executive producer, commented that she has never worked for a company like this before. She states that West Los Angeles-based company says its a “no-brainer to give 128 tick servers to players for free.”
Along with the server upgrade, Riot is also promising most of its player base to experience under 35 milliseconds latency for their matches. Latency is responsible for how fast your computer is sending your actions to the servers. For most other games, though, it highly depends on how far the nearest server is from their location. To combat this challenge, the company is spreading data centers throughout the world for the most consistent latency. It includes four in the United States alone.
This news comes with a caveat, unfortunately. As of writing, Valorant will only be coming to PC as it suits best its promises and features. Riot is not closing its door, though, to console compatibility.
