During the Summer Game Fest event that Geoff Keighley hosted today, Riot Games surprise-announced Valorant is less than two weeks away from launching, with it shedding its beta tag on June 2. The beta servers will go dark on May 28 and existing player data will be reset in preparation for the full release.
The competitive first-person shooter will be free-to-play, and handles like a combination of Counter-Strike and Overwatch, offering players a weapons economy, tight gunplay, and spray patterns alongside powerful hero abilities. Thanks to the game's closed beta key dispersion method, which required watching Twitch streams of the game, Valorant has gone on to set viewership records at the streaming platform, at peak amassing a whopping 1.7 million concurrent viewers.
The release will herald a new map, playable agent, and game mode, though further details on these additions haven't been revealed just yet. To prepare for the surge of new players and to keep latencies low, Riot is spinning up new servers in Atlanta, Dallas, Madrid, London, and Warsaw. Moreover, it is looking into improving the server stability in Colombia, Argentina, and Eastern Europe regions.
Riot will also be enabling its auto-banning system for cheaters alongside the launch, which has so far been a manual process during beta to help the company track forms of cheating. "Come launch, we will be more aggressive, widespread, and automated in our ability to detect and ban cheaters," added the developer in a separate blog post.
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