Riot Games Officially Reveals VALORANT, Its Free-to-Play First-Person Shooter

Riot Games today officially pulled back the veil on “Project A,” its mysterious first-person tactical shooter, revealing that its official title is VALORANT, it’s a free-to-play video game, and it’s set to launch Summer 2020 for the PC. Given that details had been pretty light up until this point, that’s a fairly significant amount of information to drop all at once, but Riot also announced a bunch of other odds and ends about the upcoming video game as well.

More specifically, VALORANT is a 5-on-5 tactical first-person shooter, according to Riot, which sees the teams fight in a best-of-24 series of gunfights, attackers vs. defenders. Though it didn’t share any additional specifics on the characters folks will play as, Riot does say that it will feature “a diverse cast of hypernatural, battle-ready agents from real-world cultures and locations, each bringing a set of unique abilities that complement gunplay through tactical information and strategic support, changing the way players approach a situation.” Basically, each unique character will have their own special abilities, though it’s unclear what exactly that will look like in action for every character at this point. Though the company surely would disagree with the comparison, it looks a bit like Overwatch meets Counter-Strike. You can check out the game’s official website right here.

“Throughout VALORANT‘s development, we wanted to uphold the fundamental values of a competitive tactical shooter: precise shooting, lethal gunplay, and strategic execution,” Anna Donlon, VALORANT‘s Executive Producer, said as part of the announcement. “By adding unique character abilities that complement the game’s gunplay we believe we’re expanding upon the traditional tac shooter experience and bringing something new to the genre – and we hope the launch of VALORANT will be the start of a long-term relationship with tactical FPS fans from around the world.”

Here’s some screenshots of VALORANT gameplay, courtesy of Riot Games:

What do you think of what we’ve heard and seen about VALORANT so far? Are you excited to see what Riot Games has cooking up? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!

VALORANT, previously known by its codename “Project A,” is set to release Summer 2020 for PC. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the project right here.