How Valorants Agent Characters Are Designed With Gameplay In Mind

How Valorant’s Agent Characters Are Designed With Gameplay In Mind

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Exclusive: Valorant developer Riot on the challenges of characterization in a genre simultaneously built on characters and not geared towards story.

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How Valorants Agent Characters Are Designed With Gameplay In Mind

Nearly every element of a Valorant Agent’s character design ultimately comes down to what’s best for gameplay. As a competitive, tactical shooter, many aspects of its development are in service of ensuring matches proceed fairly, which influences everything from the color of a character’s clothes to the shape of their silhouette. But, as Riot Games developers told Screen Rant, the game wouldn’t work if its avatars were drab collections of polygons; the Agents’ personalities are a big part of what can make playing Valorant continually satisfying.

Valorant characters producer John Goscicki described it this way: If a player is a Phoenix main, they’ll use the Curveball flash ability thousands of times over a matter of months. The challenge for Riot’s designers is figuring out how to make that button press feel good “every single time.”

The answer, Goscicki said, is a marriage of each Valorant character’s personality, model, visual effects, and sound.

“We could communicate the gameplay with just squares and circles and straight lines, but that wouldn’t feel good. We want these to feel like powerful, aspirational characters that make you go, ‘Damn, it’d be cool to be this person.'”

Making players feel that way isn’t simple in a game with no traditional cutscenes. As creative director David Nottingham told Screen Rant, “The game itself is more like going to the local basketball court with a bunch of friends. We didn’t want to try and force in a storytelling format that felt like it was sort of a mismatch.”

Characterization has to instead come though written bios, in-match interactions, animations on the character select screen, and the occasional Valorant cinematic trailer. Before any of that, of course, comes character design, which is itself a process that must accommodate the game’s format.

How (& Why) Each Valorant Agent Is Made

How Valorants Agent Characters Are Designed With Gameplay In Mind

The first step is determining what’s missing – what unique gameplay hook could be added, what playstyle is unaccounted for, or what character archetype the roster is lacking. For the character that became Yoru, Goscicki said, the team was looking to bring in stealth as a “tangible thing that you think about ever few rounds.” For KAY/O, the goal was a “simple, approachable character that has more grounded FPS capabilities” but also introduces suppression to Valorant. This becomes a rough gameplay concept, and if the team determines it feels good enough to play, it begins to become an actual character, informed by that gameplay.

As the developers play the test build, they note the things they’re feeling. Yoru’s gameplay encouraged outwitting other players and becoming “lurking [and] sneaky,” Goscicki said, which naturally led to a particular character archetype: an edgy, “better-than-you, smug, brutish character.” These archetypes are also balanced among the other Valorant Agents; developers consider what the gender spread of the roster is and whether there are too many edgy versus “wholesome” characters.

Once the basic, thematic pillars are nailed down, concept artists begin dreaming up “a shotgun spread” of potential character designs, Goscicki said. At one point, Riot considered making the robotic KAY/O a human in a mech suit or even “an animal robot,” before ultimately landing on his soldier-esque, humanoid appearance.

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How Valorants Agent Characters Are Designed With Gameplay In Mind

The concepting phase oftentimes results in ideas that simply wouldn’t work, either from a gameplay perspective or a worldbuilding one. A character’s silhouette might not fit what’s necessary for fairness, but a character could also just be too “high fashion.” Goscicki said making a character interesting but believable is a hard balance to strike, as every Valorant Agent needs to look “battle ready.”

“All of our characters need to be able to pick up a weapon and be able to shoot. Their powers are always going to be able to be stopped by a bullet. … There’s a reason you see a lot of pouches and belts and straps on characters.”

After the theme is refined, Goscicki, a designer, a writer, a concept artist, and “sometimes an engineer” sit down to determine how the character’s abilities will be communicated in game. “Phoenix throws fire stuff,” Goscicki said, “so it’s a question of how these fire abilities get represented.” From there, 3D artists, animators, VFX artists, audio designers, and more enter the pre-production phase, building the character and noting any kind of challenges it brings, such as needing new tech that doesn’t exist in the engine yet or introducing performance concerns. The blueprint is then done, so the rest of the Valorant team can focus on executing, and the character eventually reaches its final form.

How Valorant’s Character Design Impacts Play

In a June 2021 blog post that accompanied the “Duality” lore cinematic, Nottingham said he was excited to “peel back the layers” of Valorant’s mysterious story, which has teased an in-universe explanation for the common multiplayer conceit of characters battling copies of themselves. He told Screen Rant the same goes for its characters, but peeling back their layers isn’t as straightforward.

“You’re experiencing them in a very intense but narrow slice of someone’s life. They’re these battle-ready agents. They’re going into combat. There’s heavy gunplay. You’re seeing how they react and act in those moments. But when we’re working on the characters, we want to flesh them out with a lot more depth. So, we do think about: What is their life when they’re not involved in that moment? What is the music that they listen to?”

The last question has been communicated most clearly in “The Color of the Town” – a cinematic created by Riot Brazil that features Brazilian Agent Raze repairing her Boom Bot and slaying other Agents to the tune of an original remix of “O Canto da Cidade” – but it’s also manifested in literal Spotify playlists Riot has made for every Agent besides KAY/O. Many of these are informed by their characters’ nationalities, as each of Valorant’s Agents (again, aside from KAY/O) hails from a real-world country.

In itself, setting Valorant in a near-future version of Earth, Nottingham said, also helps communicate details about its characters’ personalities. The game can incorporate things players will recognize from their daily lives, including culture and identity.

“If [an Agent is] from Australia, or they’re from Ghana or Brazil, there’s a certain level of cultural depth that can already be brought to that. … Raze is Brazilian, and she’s from Salvador – not São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. When you look at and learn about Salvador, you realize it’s this place that has this very unique importance and culture when it comes to the Afro-Brazilian members of the population. There’s some really cool, unique, distinct aspects of that culture that can shape this character’s identity.”

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Representing this global cast, as part of the character design process, means the team wants “to find and identify people … who can consult, who can advise, who can also have input into the character,” Nottingham said. The end goal is to create characters that make players feel like “this is a game that has space for them and can see them.”

Still, a character’s background only goes so far in explaining who they are. Characterizing the individual falls to those voice lines and animations. In another game, it could come through larger narrative events and story scenes, but Valorant is aiming for more “micro” storytelling. A Fortnite-style live event wouldn’t work in Valorant at the moment, Nottingham said. “We have a game that’s designed to be small, contained combat spaces with a maximum of 10 humans running around in the server.”

For now, he’s more interested in trying to figure out how the “fundamental, human, emotional experience” that makes game world-changing events like that compelling can be distilled into little moments of characterization. Consistently updating character voice lines, for example, can give the sense that the story is moving forward – that the Agents are not stuck in time.

“There’s other techniques like that, that we are going to be introducing when our next map launches. There’s some new formats that we’re going to be trying out with players that, again, are gonna be small. If I was to sit here and go, ‘This is what we’re doing,’ you’d be like, ‘Well, I’ve seen that in [other] video games. It’s not super unique.’ But … it’s thinking about: How do we deliver these little bits of narrative and depth to players in a game genre that historically doesn’t really have that?”

Perhaps the most intriguing element of Valorant’s lore, especially from a character design perspective, is that its Agents are not single entities. Each has a “mirror” copy in an alternate-universe version of Earth, which means each is two distinct individuals. Nottingham said that, while the team has a clear sense of what separates these worlds, it didn’t have an answer for whether each world’s Agents would be characterized differently; for now, they’re essentially just the same characters with different motivations.

In the lore, this is because the “fork in the road” that split the two Valorant universes is recent. “It wasn’t like 30 years prior or 50 years prior,” Nottingham said, where enough time would pass to “radically change who the character is.” He didn’t say what, but there are just a few key differences between the characters’ arcs as a result of an “inflection point” that set their worlds down divergent paths. The alternate world isn’t an apocalyptic wasteland, he said, where it wouldn’t make sense for Jett or Phoenix to be running around in pristine clothes and sneakers.

Ultimately, though, as with everything else, the lack of real distinction comes down to function. “I really like to think that the work we’re doing always comes back to: How does this support the gameplay?,” Nottingham said. If the Valorant team really wanted to begin differentiating the alternate universe characters’ appearances or voice lines, it would need to be in service of how it feels to play the game.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/valorant-agents-character-design-gameplay-riot-games-interview/

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