Valorant has a huge technical advantage over Overwatch, developer Riot Games confirms in a new dev diary. Riot Games' new multiplayer shooter has been compared heavily to Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but this could help the game beat its two biggest rivals.
In a Valorant dev diary, Riot Games confirmed that the game's server tick-rate is 128hz. A server's tick-rate is the rate at which the server updates the game's state, and a rate of 128hz means that the server can do this 128 times a second. In comparison, Overwatch's servers have had a tick-rate of 63hz since 2016 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's tick-rate is 64hz, though players have petitioned developer Valve to update that to 128.
Riot Games is able to offer this because of its own internet service provider, which it has called Riot Direct. Riot is now building that network, say the developers, but it will be able to use information from the Valorant closed beta to see where players are. If a huge number of players are enjoying the game in a place where Riot doesn't have any servers, the suggestion is that it will be able to create some there.
A game's server tick-rate is important because of something called "peeker's advantage." In the video, Riot Games shows how someone who is doing the peeking can see the opponent before the opponent can see them, allowing them to fire before them. It also means that a game may not know if a player successfully hit an enemy or not. Riot has confirmed other features that will support the game's competitive gameplay such as Valorant's controversial anti-cheat system and this will be part of that.
Many other Valorant gameplay features will be important in helping the game to become more successful than Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Players also need to enjoy using the character abilities and the feeling of playing together, as a team.
However, this could really help the game's competitive side. The Overwatch League makes hundreds of millions of dollars for Activision Blizzard and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's eSports have also been incredibly successful for Valve. Having a higher server tick-rate could allow Valorant to steal more streamers and professional players away from other games.
The Valorant beta has been popular on Twitch but it's unclear how the tick-rate may affect the game's success in the long-term. Riot will likely keep growing the game's servers once the game launches in summer.
Valorant will release this summer for PC.