Left hand view model inbound? Developers answer community questions

Riot owned Valorant is undeniably the hottest FPS team based shooter game on the market. In an effort to continue fueling the fire, the developers have taken a very transparent stance to keep players involved

This week, the team released a blog answering some of the most requested questions over the past month. In what's being called a "digital town hall," we'll be breaking down the lengthy piece and give you the condensed information

Map rotation and queue times

Players have become increasingly concerned over the queue times, especially at the highest levels. With the 1.08 patch scheduled to reduce players from getting the same map multiple times in a row, the implications could be detrimental for the highest ranks

Riot soothed those concerns by confirming that the change will not have a significant effect. "A little bit of flexibility" while still "keep(ing) queue times popping at the same pace," developers wrote

Updates to existing skins

A popular tradition that Epic Games' Fortnite popularized with their existing sellable items is the frequent refurbishing old skins. While Valorant is keeping an open mind to following suit, they're cautious about the tradeoff that occurs

"Going back to work on something we’ve already released means that we aren’t working on the next awesome thing that you’re all waiting for. This is a trade off we don’t take lightly, because ultimately we want to prioritize the content you all want most," they finished with

Left hand view model

Counter-Strike refugees that are moving over to Valorant are missing one key luxury after swapping between FPS titles: no left hand view model. Every Valorant player is forced to hold the gun in their right hand as a result

From a QoL perspective, adding the left hand view model is a top priority for gamers. Naturally, Valorant wanted to break down the development piece by piece and explain how they'll go about implementation:

We know that this is something that a lot of players have been asking for and we've been doing some exploration into this. We're currently in the process of validating how this would work from not just a technical side but from a competitive and artistic front as well. While this may seem like a small technical challenge, we want to make sure this is done right for players. To do this we need to validate a couple of different things:

The first thing we want to consider is how we maintain the art fidelity of our awesome weapon skins, character models, and abilities. We don't frequently get to see different camera views of our first person weapons and viewarms so we'll need to make sure our art still holds up when we switch hands for players. We'll need to make sure that abilities still originate from the same place and that our hot fire still looks like... well... hot fire.

The second aspect we need to consider is how this might impact the competitive integrity of the game. We want to ensure that there are no advantages or disadvantages to playing with a left handed view model and that we maintain a fair competitive playing field. We want to make sure that left hand view isn't the new meta or that players with this preference aren't nerfed.

While this is something on our radar, we still need to ensure that we meet the criteria mentioned above and to do so we'll need to put these changes through rigorous competitive and artistic testing. With all that in mind, we unfortunately don't have a date we can share for when we think this will be available to players.

Valorant answers top trending questions biweekly. I'm all for the effort to increase transparency, especially in a game where a competitive scene is so quickly developing

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