What happened to Valorant will happen in League of Legends. Riot Games' shooter is moving to a new, modern engine, and at the same time potential game engines are getting the green light.
Valorant, Riot Games' hero-packed version of Counter-Strike, has enjoyed enduring popularity, but it looks like further development will require a radical move. Game studio head Anna Donlon at the Unreal Developers Conference a statementtheir team has extracted the last of Unreal Engine 4, so it's time to port Valorant to Unreal Engine 5 – no small task for a live service game.
According to Donlon, neither the look nor the performance of the game will change (at least initially), but with the new engine, developers will have much more freedom to expand and improve the online FPS game as they please. And the story doesn't end there! Donlon also hinted that by replacing the engine, it will open up the opportunity to develop “new gaming experiences” for the Valorant team, which means that it is not at all unlikely that, like League of Legends, we can expect new and more brutal game modes or even a completely new presentation of the games.
By the way, Valorant's last big hit was the console port, which resulted in a bloody cool update, despite the fact that PCs are still the core of the game's community. Valorant had around 28 million active players last year, and that number must have increased significantly since then, thanks to the cross-platform trend.