Riot Games had officially announced players’ complaints on in-game sounds in the developer’s tactical shooter, Valorant. Audio director Peter Zinda accepted in the sixth edition of it’s ‘Ask Valorant’ blog series, ‘te here is truth to’ responses shared by the fans who had said that they ‘have a hard time telling how far away a footstep is’. He further added that the recent sounds optimisation is to make sure that ‘footsteps are heard, as opposed to optimizing for portraying distance’.
“What this looks like is an attenuation curve that is somewhat flat, versus one that drops off a lot over distance,” Zinda clarified. “There are a couple of reasons we do this. One is that under chaotic conditions where abilities are being used and you are probably hearing a lot of VOIP from your team, it is essential that you don’t miss a footstep.”
He also asserted that Valorant had been played in ‘a variety of contexts’, and the sound had been optimised for a common motive. “NA players may be used to playing in a quiet room and hearing every detail, but players in China or Korea may be playing in a loud PC Bang (LAN gaming center), where a footstep that was quiet but gave more information on distance would be lost,” he said.
Ask VALORANT, and we shall respond! This week we’re answering whether the Operator is OP, what’s up with footsteps, and why we’re choosing timed rollouts vs all at once. Click to read all about it: https://t.co/qELyxBSSVN pic.twitter.com/dH3TrhokuO
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) August 27, 2020
In that post, the game designer Nicholas ‘Nickwu’ Smith also had acknowledged the current meta in Valorant comprised of the sniper weapon Operator. He also noted that the team ‘think(s) the Operator isn’t ‘too OP’.
“But (we) do believe that the feeling sometimes comes from a lack of personal agency against the weapon (for Agents that don’t have tools to break a line of sight for themselves), coupled with an overwhelming amount of team coordination to effectively counter an Operator,” he reinforced.
Smith also made a note that the teams are presently ‘looking into a lot of avenues to help smooth out the experience’, but ultimately believes that ‘the Operator should be powerful and should encourage a team to thoughtfully enter a space where it might be in play’.
Ahead of this month, Riot Games had sent out a patch 1.06 for Valorant. The somewhat minor update in comparison to previous patches for Valorant showed a major problem in all shotguns, which had been made to be less meticulous when fired in the air, with its spread loss increased upto 1.25.
