Riot Games announced today that Valorant, their highly-anticipated 5v5 team-based shooter, will officially launch on June 2.
The latest game from the League of Legends developer has been in closed beta since April, but that hasn't stopped the game from dominating the esports conversation for weeks now.
Invitations to the closed beta test were given out to those who hooked up their Riot Games accounts with their Twitch accounts and who watched Valorant Twitch streams over the last few weeks. Naturally, that's a good way to get eyeballs on your game, and the game generated a hell of a lot of buzz in very short order. So much so, it's drawn in a number of established esports players from rival Overwatch.
If you haven't been a part of Valorant's closed beta, don't worry, everyone starts fresh on June 2, according to Riot Games. Riot Games has also been working to upscale their infrastructure in preparation for the game's general release.
What can we expect on launch day?
According to Riot Games, things could be a bit dicey.
"New datacenters are already being stood up to service player demand in areas where latency isn’t meeting our standards," the company said in a press release. "On our current short-term roadmap is to get new game server deployments in Warsaw, Madrid, London, Atlanta, and Dallas. We’re also not satisfied with latency in Colombia, Argentina, and Eastern Europe—looking at options there."
The company is hoping to get most players to below 35ms ping on their servers, but some regions like India and the Middle East will have to wait for datacenters close enough to achieve that kind of latency. The game will still launch worldwide on June 2nd though, high ping or no.
"You’ll have higher latencies than we’d like," the company said, "but we figured you’d want to play the game as soon as possible."
Given the anticipation around Valorant, that might be the understatement of the year.
