Riot Games responds to “abilities don’t kill in Valorant" tweet

When Valorant was first announced, it was promoted as a character-based first-person shooter with abilities. These unique abilities would make it stand out from similar titles like CS:GO, but gunplay was still supposed to take centre stage in fights.

Back in October 2019, when the game was still known by the codename “Project A”, Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent posted a now somewhat infamous tweet on the subject.

To be clear, in Project A, shooting matters. You don’t kill with abilities. Abilities create tactical opportunities to take the right shot. Characters have abilities that augment their gunplay, instead of fighting directly with their abilities.

— nicolo (@niiicolo) October 16, 2019

The key line here, which has been brought up time and time again over the last few months by disgruntled players, is “You don’t kill with abilities”.

This statement is often misquoted as “abilities don’t kill”, which despite looking incredibly similar, is where most of the confusion comes from. The second version implies that abilities in Valorant can not kill, which is clearly not the case with agents like Raze and Killjoy.

The reason this topic is so contentious is that gamers hate dying to abilities. It’s one thing to be out-aimed by a better player, but if a less skilled opponent kills you just because they are using an ability, this feels unfair.

As clarified by Character Design Lead Ryan Scott in the latest edition of “Ask Valorant”, guns do provide the majority of kills in Valorant, but “abilities that deal damage are a core part of tactical games”.

Riot’s stance is very much that damage abilities are designed to impose a threat, which allows players to manipulate enemies and finish off eliminations with a gun. And for the most part, this seems to be what is happening.