Unfinished: Valorant (04/24/2020)

As a pretty long time Overwatch player I don't really appreciate the comparison but OW looked VERY different in beta/release years ago.

@confideration said:

As someone who played Overwatch once during a free weekend, this looks exactly like Overwatch inserted into Counter Strike.

This game is eerily silent. The only noise comes from abilities and gun shots. Granted, in dev, early access, beta, whatever you want to call it.

That kill at 24:25?? pretttyyyyy good

Getting trapped in that match is classic Giant Bomb.

Yeah the game is basically Counterstrike gunplay, and toned down Overwatch-ish skills. As somebody who played a lot of CS many years ago, and doesn't like the gunplay in OW (shooting shields is not all that fun for me), this is a perfect combination IMO. That said, it can be very unforgiving... definitely not a good game to stream casually IMO, which is unfortunate, but hopefully there will be some lighter modes coming out soon.

Framerate on the video is pretty low though for some reason.

This just looks like an even slower version of Shadowrun. I still wish that healing tree was more of a thing in other games :(

I know the idea of an item that pulses and shows enemy location isn't new or unique. But they really put that ability on the bow, huh? They could've tried to differentiate from Overwatch just a little bit more, is all I'm saying.

I saw a headline today that said Valorant's success on Twitch wasn't an accident, which is a really funny way of saying, "They sent a bunch of keys to streamers with a lot of followers and paid for advertising."

Jeff uninstalls all the best games halfway through the Unfinished.

lol what is going on with this totally unwatchable framerate

I'm with Jeff about shitty competitive people. I always got around this in multiplayer games by muting everyone. But as things got more team-based over time I started shifting away from multiplayer altogether (unless it's a game that doesn't require much communication).

Yeah, headache-inducing

I'm ~15 matches into this game and I'm loving everything about it. I wasn't able to get into Rainbow 6 Siege or CS:GO for some reason, but this game is a ton of fun.

EDIT: Also, yeah, the FPS in this video is really rough. I hope for Ben's sake he isn't playing with that stuttery of FPS!

I played exactly enough of this game to be whelmed by it, and then the kernel thing came out and it went from fine to a hard NOPE for me.

I will say though this game has the same problem for me that high level CS:GO does of the people being savage in a way that makes it unfun.

A lot of people in the stream chat were commenting how sterile/lifeless this game seemed. Which I totally understand, and even agree to a certain extent. But it also seemed that a lot of them were wondering why this game was made. League of Legends and CS:GO are two of the biggest esports going. Riot has the resources to make their own CS:GO, so here it is: their attempt to take more of the esports pie than they already have. Most esports players do not care one iota about lore, flavor, background, all that superfluous stuff. Hell, most of them would probably play a textureless game with bland polygonal models, as long as the gameplay was solid. And Valorant's gameplay is fairly solid. It's trying to be Counter-Strike with abilities, and that's exactly what it feels like. So that's why this game seems so lifeless. They're gunning for the esports audience, and they're not shy about it. That, and it's still beta. Some of those aspects will probably be added or fleshed out before "release." But it will never be a focus.

this looks extremely nothing to me holy hell, even less here than I was led to believe. I hope the people who enjoy it continue having fun, and I hope the developers keep providing whatever that may be, but I phased out of watching a bomb beep with this kind of base formula, spin or unspun, the word 'nothing' comes to mind when I ask myself 'what am I watching right now'.

I like this game a lot because there's nothing else out there like CS, the core mechanics of which I like, but everyone who plays CS has been doing so for like 25 years and are extremely unfun to play against.

Also I like that there's some randomization in the recoil patterns, something I think is miserable in CS.

Jeff understands what makes FPS gameplay so compelling. Nice teabag form, Duder!

How many games in Giantbomb history have been uninstalled during the quick look/unfinished?

Did Ben record this locally and this is the actual framerate, or is this a capture of his stream and it's just the stream's framerate? Doesn't look like that demanding a game.

Jeff playing the jaded games industry dude to a tee when he scoffed at the League KPOP band thing.

No fun allowed.

Riot has a good history of having at least visually distinctive (if not unique) design, which is why I find this choice to make their Counter-Strike/League hybrid this muddy, beige shooter so baffling.

I get that they're shamelessly chasing the CS:GO esports money so the weapon archetypes have to behave literally the same and retain the same silhouette and having flat-shaded models scales better to a wider range of PC performances, but we live in a world where Overwatch has been around for more than 4 years (and honestly, Dirty Bomb was around for 5) so we know shooters like this don't have to be so dull and uninspired to look at.

But at the end of the day I guess it doesn't really matter, they have obviously already fine-tuned this game to appeal to a specific audience who care less about any of these things and more about its mechanical finesse, which it looks like it most definitely has in spades.

I mute all public voice and text chat these days and mostly just pretend I'm playing with and against bots.

@nemesisnd1derboy: Plus their song was an absolute bop.

While the character designs are fine, this game looks spectacularly boring. Seems like a cynically uninspired attempt to break into a new market.

Shadowrun was probably my favorite multiplayer game on the 360. It didn't get a lot of love back then but it had a lot of great ideas. And yeah that healing tree was pretty darn cool.

@hobozero: I have an eight-year-old PC and it runs at a minimum of 140-160fps, peaking to 200 at times. Not really sure how they managed to get such poor frame rate captured here.

If any fellow Giant Bomb fans played a lot of the original CS - this feels exactly like it, much moreso than CS:GO or CS:Source. It's made by people who played CS professionally (or at least a lot) and it iterates just the right amount on that core gameplay. They've integrated the MOBA abilities perfectly.

It's going to be a massive eSport, and it's ridiculously addictive. I've already had to enforce a self-ban because I spent four days straight playing it.

Does not look like it's running well on Ben's machine. Isn't it supposed run on a potato to get all the youngins on board? Or is it the streaming and recording stuff messing with the performance?

lol, the not being able to leave a custom game thing is a shitty bug, ran into that with friends the other day. we were waiting for our 5th to get on and said "let's just dick around 2v2 for a bit" and got stuck in it until we finished it. not a good first impression for sure

Why is the FPS so choppy?

What the hell fps was the recording set to? Why would they think this was ok to upload? Fingers crossed they do another one of these soon

Y'all understand they're recording these via stream capture, right? They don't have studios (studia?) at the moment, so perhaps try to forgive the occasional frame drop due to literally the same thing you're all experiencing all the time.

Honestly, I'm kinda baffled that they uploaded this. The framerate is just a bad capture I imagine but that coupled with spending half of it in a 1v1 custom match is... well... just not showing much of anything. Odd.

@msoven: It doesn't look like an occasional frame drop, but the whole video is like that. I'm not a Twitch streamer but I've used it to show games to friends, and never did the archived footage look like this. I'm not upset or anything but it's a very poor way to showcase a game... I'm guessing something went wrong that they didn't notice? I don't really know.

Also to people saying OW looks better - it absolutely does... but I can easily push 144 FPS on Valorant (usually 200+) and it doesn't have all the visual diarrhea of Overwatch. The game will not be fun if you don't care or can't care about CS though. The shooting in CS is fantastic, and while Valorant has issues (the great walk+shoot debate) it's such a different pace from CoD I love it.

@msoven: Generally forgive them anyways, on impulse. Gotten so much out of them. But it probably doesn't hurt that I don't give much of anything for this kind of game.

Nice teabag form, Jeff.

Well maybe our experiences are not the same, then. For me, it largely ran completely smoothly with a few multi-second hitches, maybe three of them over the course of the video. Not being a production person, I have no idea what this means! I guess I shouldn't assume it's identical for everyone else.

Do they ever mention Riot picked up some old CS 1.6 pros to design this game? People calling it a soulless ripoff are way off the mark imo.

Why is the footage 48 FPS?

Yea this is pretty much unwatchable. Game seems like it could be fun though, I hope you record some more.

What's with the framerate of this vid?

It has to be something with the capture. This game will run at 60 on practically everything besides a cromebook

Wow, why are people being so shitty about the framerate? Holy crap, give them a break--they've been pumping out content despite being completely quarantined at home. You'll survive a little hitchiness.

This makes complete sense. It's a global pandemic, everyone is a little on edge. Not everyone on staff is a video producer with an extensive knowledge of audio and video setups and possible computer hardware and software discrepancies. All the hosts have been tasked with something special of them, consistent streaming under a variety of unique conditions all at home, with vastly different tech setups between them.

I definitely appreciate Giant Bomb isn't some faceless corporate outfit that's uniformly tailored and stitched up in a fake way just pumping out cookie cutter videos. The off the cuff nature of this website is an important part of the GB puzzle.

On the other hand, it's a been a month. Kinks are kinks, and usually kinks get worked out, after they're kinked up a bit naturally, and then mostly worked out over time. A solid 20-30~fps is not exactly a worked through kink yet. But it wasn't such a big deal to me in this video. I could see how it might effect some people. Especially those with more sensitive vision.

Twitch is a thing though, and there are dozens if not hundreds or thousands of streamers with 0 viewers that have little to no FPS issues.

As long as the duders are trying their best I'm cool with whatever they do.

@benpack

Ben the guy wasn't mad at you, he was mad at the other guy talking.

Guy B (the guy who is actually mad at you) said look to your right.

Guy A (the guy you think is mad at you) said "why did you tell him to look to his right? he already knew someone was there"

Then Guy B defends his statement by saying you weren't looking to the right.

Guy A gets aggressively loud (in defense of you) at Guy B.

This game looks awful.

very hard to watch this with that frame rate