VALORANT Episode 3 Act 1 – New agent, Battlepass and more

IGC is happy to bring you tons of updates around VALORANT Episode 3, Act 1 which will kick off on 22nd June.

Ep.3 Act 1: Battlepass

• Price: 1,000 VP
• What types of things are available in it:
  • Weapon Skins
  • Gun Buddies
  • Cards
  • Sprays
  • Titles
• Maybe list some of the marquee items
  • Free
    • Jigsaw Ghost
    • Greatly Increased? Spray
    • Greatly Decreased? Spray
    • The Key to Ancient Mysteries Buddy
    • Snowbirds Card
  • Paid
    • K/TAC Vandal
    • K/TAC Melee
    • Jigsaw Bulldog
    • Monarch Bucky
    • Force Card
    • Save Card
    • Clutch or Kick Spray
    • Salmon Nigiri Buddy
  • What is the duration of the pass?
    • Episode 3, Act 1
      • Strat Date 6/22/2021
      • End Date 8/24/2021
    • Any changes to the battlepass mechanics from before?
      • Squad Boost is coming to VALORANT! Play with your friends to receive bonus experience from each game you play during the VALORANT Year One Event from 6/22/2021 to 7/6/2021.
        • Party of 1: 0% Bonus XP
        • Party of 2: 8% Bonus XP
        • Party of 3: 12% Bonus XP
        • Party of 4: 16% Bonus XP

Party of 5: 20% Bonus XP

What were your goals when designing the Battlepass?

As with every battlepass, we always want to create content that appeals to a wide and diverse audience. A player might not love every single thing in the battlepass, but there should always be at least one thing that they absolutely love. For this pass, we wanted it to feel very much like a reflection on the past because it’s been one year since the game launched. That’s why we created the K/TAC and Jigsaw gun skins as callbacks to our lore and agents. Lately, we’ve also tried to just create stuff that players will find funny, like the “Too Heavy” and “Clutch or Kick” sprays. If we’re cracking up over something, we hope that players will find it funny too, like some of the memey Jett sprays we’ve done in the past.

Said Preeti Khanolkar, Senior Producer

What did you take inspiration from / any notable concepts you wanted to convey with the Battlepass?

Players have been asking for more lore-based content and since it’s been a year since the release of the Kingdom gun skins, we decided to create the K/TAC skins. We actually made the very first concepts for these skins years ago when we thought they might be the base weapons. That changed, of course, but we loved that old design so we used it as inspiration for K/TAC. For Jigsaw, we really love the key art for all of the agents and wanted to use that in some way. One of our concept artists did a sketch of a puzzle-themed gun and we loved it. Since this battlepass was timed with the one-year anniversary of VALORANT, we decided to do variants using the key art for the Agents that have been released since the game launched: Killjoy, Skye, Yoru, and Astra (sorry, KAY/O). It felt like a cool way to reflect on those Agents!

Said Sean Marino, Art Lead

Any unexpected challenges or novelty stories you’d like to share when designing the Battlepass?

This battlepass probably has the most fun metagame content we’ve ever done (my favorite type of content). We saw that players really liked some of the other meta stuff we’ve done, so we added the “Force” and “Save” Cards, the “Max Money” “Clutch or Kick” and “No Pen” sprays, and the “Naked Op” Card. Likewise, the Competitive Team (which makes the Ranked system) asked us to add the “Greatly Increased?” and “Greatly Decreased?” sprays as a little thank-you to the community for all their feedback on the ranked system. Oh, and we finally went through all the Weapon Schema cards and have left the best for last: the Guardian! And of course it’s in the same Chapter as the “No Guardian” spray and a Guardian skin. Maybe you all won’t find that funny, but we kind of did.

Said Preeti Khanolkar, Senior Producer

New Agent KAY/O

What were your goals when designing KAY/O?

With KAY/O we our goal was to add something that felt familiar to traditional FPS players, but had elements that made it uniquely fit within VALORANT. This is represented in a couple of ways:

 

FLASH//DRIVE and FRAG//MENT should be bread and butter gameplay for many of you that have been lobbing nades your whole lives 🙂

 

With Suppression creating moments where gunplay is all people can rely on.

 

KAY/O was the first Agent that we started developing after the game launched, and we wanted to integrate him into the world a bit more. By now you have seen the teasers on Breeze, which were one way we pursued this, for all of you lore inclined folks he has some fun relationships with the roster 🙂

 

Finally Robots are cool….. Yea

Said John Goscicki – Character Producer

Outside of the opportunity goals on the roster, to make an agent that felt familiar to traditional FPS players, we kind of wanted to push for some really intuitive and almost “back to basics” type of inputs. I think all of the designers here tend to have quite the imagination for mechanics so being able to add a bit of VALORANT spice to the “basics”, felt great to be able to achieve on KAY/O with the addition of Suppression. An aspiration we have for KAY/O is that FPS players could take some of the common mastery they have acquired from other games, like throwing grenades, and apply them in an intuitive way to access the outputs of KAY/O’s kit. The throwing knife is a really fun story and I pretty much just thought it would be badass if you could throw a knife into a wall, so luckily everyone also bought in and we made it work. One of the secondary goals I had, in mind, while designing KAY/O and his simplistic inputs was that I wanted KAY/O players to really think of the map and be able to see geo and make decisions based off of it. Maps give us walls, windows, empty roofs, and a ton of fun geo that is easy to intuit at a first glance and I hope players can combine the intuitiveness of our map geometry and thrown utility to make for some fun plays.

Said Ryan Cousart – KAY/O Game Designer

What did you take inspiration from / any notable concepts you wanted to convey with KAY/O?

 I think at one point the pitch deck for KAY/O just had a gif of flashbangs being thrown in other FPS games. The funny thing here is that traditional flash/grenades are actually some of the most complex abilities in terms of how long it takes to lab them properly, and that can have variable results. We have all been playing with them for so long though. It’s such a comfortable ability, it’s like, give me a bag of flamin hot cheetos, some green tea, and a flash bang… this is how I have been fraggin for 17 years.

Said John Goscicki – Character Producer

Given I’m not too versed in my sci-fi, I actually learned a lot about different inspirations from Terminator to I, Robot, even all the way to Chappie. I have yet to see Terminator 2, but hopefully by the time KAY/O goes live I’d have given it a go so I don’t face waves of embarrassment. Jokes aside, I think a lot of games I’ve grown up playing tend to utilize militaristic grenades and utility in ways that you kind of get comfortable with. The inspirational thing about these grenades is that they have this Newtonian physics to them that is easy to intuit, making it easy to access and master different outputs in these tactical or militaristic shooters. We knew we wanted grenades but as soon as the concepts started coming in and the stories started getting written, we all started to see a really inspiring throughline that shaped the signature and ultimate ability. I remember going into the paper kit validation with Max (Orcane) and had this beautiful story and dream for this character and when I got to the “Radiant Killer” part of it, I vividly remember him going “STOP. That right there, Radiant Killer, I don’t care about anything else let’s make that.” The day after I presented this idea of his design without even knowing that Joe Kileen, the narrative lead on KAY/O, had just written a blurb and pitched the exact same thing before I had joined. All the work we had done to collaborate had paid off and we locked down KAY/O’s core design and bio.

Said Ryan Cousart – KAY/O Game Designer

Any unexpected challenges or novelty stories you’d like to share when designing KAY/O?

So early on in development Rycou, represented suppression by throwing a Jett knife and having it explode. As we were mocking up what the ability could be everyone was like… it’s gotta stay a knife, it doesn’t make sense as anything else. This resulted in all of us trying to figure out how the technology for an exploding suppression knife works, and why a robot needs it. Every review someone would be like “I’m so happy we made it a knife ;_;”

We needed to give players that had just been Suppressed better feedback that they couldn’t use an ability. One way we did this was by hooking up the “I can’t use that” VO line whenever you try to use an ability while suppressed. Apparently when Viper has ulted, she thinks she is constantly casting…. This resulted in Viper constantly saying “I can’t use that” but with the frequency it sounded like she was poorly trying to beatbox.

Said John Goscicki – Character Producer

A fun fact about the downed state was that it was something we threw on KAY/O since it was a cool mechanic, thematically, where he overloads and just goes into kind of a metal ball. When trying to pair down the kit to the core, I remember being in a meeting where we talked and made the call to cut it from the kit but I didn’t have a chance to remove it right away. As a bit of a send-off to the mechanic, I lowered the Ult Points to 5 and we just started doing these “rescue missions” in our design playtest. I distinctly remember going into the round-ups after the playtest just having the biggest grin on my face and us laughing about these missions and after a full two days of us having a bit of fun on it, we decided to keep the mechanic. After a few tweaks, the downed state gave us a big opportunity to give the KAY/O his killer robot fantasy, enticing him to move forward and kill, while creating a unique mid round objective if he was downed.

There’s an interesting story to how Suppression actually came about, which is one of the stories I’ll never forget. During the prototyping phase of KAY/O, I had a bit of a hard time piecing together mechanics that we felt were cohesive for selling the fantasy of this agent. We knew our design goals and the audience but I think I was trying to get a bit too fancy with some of the mechanics. I started having these late night sessions with Max (Orcane), where I threw a bunch of paths and he would help me figure out which of them were dead ends. I remember, one night, we had just kind of started talking about some of the goals and one of us had said, “eff abilities man, I just wanna frag,” which is how we got to Suppression being what it is today — allowing players to only have to worry about enemies shooting guns at them without having to worry about their abilities. We got it in game, started testing out a bunch of iterations of this and the rest was history.

Said Ryan Cousart – KAY/O Game Designer

Year 1 Event Pass

Key Features

This free pass includes exclusive content related to VALORANT’s 1st birthday celebration, such as:

• Year One Gun Buddy
• Year One Card
• EP 3 // Reflection Card
• YR1 and Year One Titles

20 Radianite Points

What were your goals when designing the YR1 Event Pass?

Our main goal with the YR1 Event Pass was to offer players free content that commemorates and celebrates VALORANT’s 1st birthday. We can’t believe it’s been one year since VALORANT launched, and we’re so grateful that players have joined us on this journey so far.

Said Sean Marino, Art Lead

What did you take inspiration from / any notable concepts you wanted to convey with the YR1 Event Pass?

We were inspired by how much players love some of the exclusive Closed Beta content, like the Beta Watch Card and the V1.0 Title. We thought it would be fun to feature Jett doing something low-key, so we designed the Year One Card as if Jett were baking a cake in her kitchen and also made one of the slices of cake into a gun buddy! The third Episode card featuring KAY/O and several other Agents is available in this pass, so you can complete your set. If you’re wondering why we added Radianite Points, it’s because the final free tier in the Episode 3 Act 1 Battlepass is the Jigsaw Ghost. Each Variant for the Jigsaw Ghost has a different Agent, and we wanted players to be able to choose their favorite between Yoru, Skye, Astra, and Killjoy.

Said Preeti Khanolkar, Senior Producer

Give Back Charity Bundle

Players have voted for their favorite skins to be included in this special charity-themed bundle: the Reaver Vandal, Ion Operator, VALORANT GO! Vol. 1 Spectre, and the Reaver Sheriff! The bundle also includes an exclusive Give Back Bundle gun buddy, card, and spray!

Weapons:

• Reaver Sheriff
• VALORANT GO! Vol. 1 Spectre
• Reaver Vandal
• Ion Operator

Price Tier:

PE tier

Bundle Info:

Price: 6,382 VP

Includes

• Reaver Sheriff
• VALORANT GO! Vol. 1 Spectre
• Reaver Vandal
• Ion Operator
• Give Back Gun Buddy
• Give Back Card

Give Back Spray

What were your goals when designing the Give Back Bundle? 

We’ve heard from a lot of players that they’d really love if they could donate to charity by purchasing skins. We liked that idea a lot and wanted players to participate as part of our One Year launch anniversary by donating to the Riot Impact Fund. So, we thought the best way to do that was having players vote on which skins they’d want to include in the Give Back Bundle!

Said Preeti Khanolkar, Senior Producer

What’s behind the design of the Give Back Bundle accessories?

We wanted to create a piece of content that would feel special and connected to the Give Back Bundle. The image of two agents, Sage and Astra, clasping their hands together in solidarity really stuck with us and we hope you’ll all think it’s beautiful and inspiring too.

Said Preeti Khanolkar, Senior Producer

Anything else you would like to share with our players?

Before we started voting, I was really curious which gun skins would win! I had a friendly bet with Joe Lee (@SWAGGERNAU7 on Twitter) going! I was betting the Reaver Vandal would win the rifle category, and Joe bet the Prime Vandal. Historically, Joe loses all bets to me, and this was proven to be true once again.

Said Preeti Khanolkar, Senior Producer

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