Valorant, the competitive online shooter from League of Legends developer Riot Games, is quickly moving toward its summer release window and a potential beta. Riot continues to share bits of information about the game, assumedly as it confirms things internally. The latest example is a confirmation of some early Valorant character details. Specifically, that while Valorant will be launching with a healthy roster of 10 or more playable characters, not all of them will be immediately accessible.
According to an IGN interview with Valorant's executive producer Ann Donlon, the game will require players to unlock characters before being able to play them. At launch, five characters will be open to players for free. The remaining Valorant characters, whether that's five or more, will be unlockable and will remain inaccessible until players progress enough to earn them.
Donlon describes this unlocking process as an "engagement-incentivized model." This process involves either simple gameplay or systems participation, or it can be a purchase according to previous Riot comments. In other words, Riot appears to have decided to sell gameplay elements in Valorant. Specifically, Riot will be offering ways to buy character unlocks. This won't come as too much of a surprise to League of Legends players, who have dealt with character unlocks since the game's launch.
The non-premium unlocking process will apparently be similar in nature to how players will progress in Valorant's battle pass. If it's anything like League of Legends, players will progress by playing, completing very simple challenges, and potentially through a meta progression system with more complicated rewards.
Valorant's battle pass will have a similar progression system and will also have both a free and premium version available to players. It's unclear if character unlocks will be part of the battle pass, though progressing through the battle pass will likely help players unlock new characters in one way or another.
It's going to be interesting to see if Riot Games faces more criticism for its Valorant plans than it has for League of Legends. League of Legends came about during a time when the industry was still figuring out monetization systems. Gamers have grown much more critical of monetization systems that sell gameplay elements, often referred to as selling power or advantage. Free-to-play games do get away with a lot more than premium games, though.
Valorant is tentatively planned for release in summer 2020.
Source: IGN