Valorant Release Date Moved Up Despite COVID-19

There's a lot of excitement surrounding Valorant, the newest game from League of Legends developer Riot Games. Following a closed beta period where invites were handed out randomly to people who were watching streamers play Valorant on Twitch, the game has seemingly found its fanbase. The big question now is when Valorant will launch, and that's a question Riot answered today.

Originally, Riot planned a rather vague "summer 2020," release window for Valorant, but if you were worried that Riot might not be able to meet that window because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's hard to blame you. Indeed, in a video today, Riot makes it seem like the release date for Valorant has been delayed because of the pandemic before flipping the script entirely and announcing that the release date has actually been moved up.

Valorant will now be releasing in less than two weeks – on June 2nd, 2020 to be exact. In a post to the Valorant website, Riot goes into some detail about what its doing to make the game ready for launch, covering topics such as anti-cheat and the Valorant servers. In regards to anti-cheat, Riot says that its Vanguard system has been good at tracking cheaters, but we've yet to see the company roll out the second half of its tech, which will auto-ban those cheaters.

Riot says that once launch finally arrives, it will "be more aggressive, widespread, and automated in our ability to detect and ban cheaters," in Valorant. The company has also committed to implementing "clear community expectations for all Valorant players" and 72 hour team chat and voice restrictions for those who violate them.

As far as servers are concerned, Riot thinks that a fresh influx of players will help keep latency down, but it's still looking to add data centers in certain regions of the world – Warsaw, Madrid, London, Atlanta, and Dallas specifically – to help with that. It also says that it isn't happy with latency issues in Colombia, Argentina, and Eastern Europe, so it will be looking into solutions for those problems as well.

Finally, Riot addressed the state of the game itself, saying that it will continue keeping a close eye on balance. It also plans to add an alternate game mode that isn't as intense as Valorant's main mode by launch, with new agents, maps, and skins to follow in the months after release. We'll see what happens after Valorant launches next month, but for now, it seems that Riot has a fairly extensive roadmap planned.