Riot Games Teases New Valorant Games and Unreal Engine 5 Port With Future Graphics Updates

[Cpt.Jank]

Epic Games kicked off the Unreal Fest in Seattle earlier this week with a keynote that revealed some interesting details about the company's marketing and publication strategies going forward. Also during that same keynote, Riot Games executive producer, Anna Donlon, teased that there will be more "playable experiences" coming to the "Valorant universe."

While Donlon was deliberately vague about any upcoming Valorant-adjacent games currently in development, she was a little more candid about Valorant's Unreal Engine 5 update, admitting that limitations in Unreal Engine 4.27—Valorant's current underpinnings—were what prompted the move to UE5 in the first place. However, a shift to Unreal Engine 5 will not immediately change how the game performs, feels, or looks.


It's unclear what exactly the Valorant development team is working on, but its League of Legends spin-offs, like Legends of Runeterra and League of Legends: Wild Rift, were generally rather well received, even by those who weren't already LoL players. When it came to upgrading Valorant to Unreal Engine 5, Donlon had this to say:

And this upgrade is not going to significantly change how Valorant looks or performs, at least not right away, but here's what I can say...there are many developers back at Riot who are incredibly grateful for what Unreal has allowed us to do for players, and there are many developers back at Riot who are very excited about what UE5 can do for us in the future.

She also took the time to specifically call out the fact that Valorant will continue prioritizing the player experience, specifically when it comes to being able to run the game on lower-end hardware. Often, as games and developers switch to a new game engine, like Unreal Engine 5, the minimum PC specifications start to rise rather quickly, and high frame rates are vital to a fast-paced, competitive game, like Valorant.

Epic Games earlier this week also revealed some of the new features that will arrive in Unreal Engine 5 with the Unreal Engine 5.5 Preview. The biggest changes come down to a new, more accurate dynamic lighting system, called MegaLights and new animation and rendering tools that should reduce the reliance on external programs.

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[Battler624]

Assuming riot hasn't modified UE4 to fit their needs (and also fixed its scheduling issues) this would be a good upgrade with performance improvements.

100% they wont bring any of the UE5 exclusive features such as nanite or lumen as they dont fit their game (maybe as options? but i doubt it) but using the improved schedular in 5.4 is pretty terrific.

 

[The Quim Reaper]

How about fixing the issues that this overrated engine has on the PC, Epic?

Your engine is fundamentally flawed when trying to run on non fixed hardware platforms.

You keep adding new features but never fix it's basic, underlying issues such as

1. Appalling shader compilation stuttering.
2. Traversal stutter that's been making open world games on UE terrible for over a decade.
3. Low multi threading efficiency, UE thrives on one or two ultra fast cores but hardly bothers the rest.

 

[Vincero]

"Riot Games Teases New Rootkit Enabled Unreal Version"

There, fixed the headline for you....

 

[phints]

PUBG has needed to do this for some time now too. Both engines should be upgraded to UE 5.5 asap, more performant, better graphics, better audio, support for Nanite and Lumen, etc. Valorant is kind of a tiny static map game with camping the same corners over an over. For massive environments like PUBG it's far more needed.

 

[Suspecto]

Can we stop with this nonsense about UE 5 being more performant?

No, it isn't, if you simply port the same assets from UE4 to UE5, IT WILL RUN WORSE since the engine is more demanding.

Not to mention, it is a stuttery mess plagued by the same problem the UE4 is, the only thing which has improved, it the documentation and SDK, so even a complete novice can work with it, import stuff and it is more or less free with their pricing policy.

I own several games which moved to UE5, be Ready or Not, Dark and Darker etc and the performance incredibly tanked, I went from 120 fps to 80fps with constant drops to 40fps.

UE5 is a blurry mess just like UE4 was when first released and its iterations.

Lumen and Nanite are Nvidia Gameworks 2.0, offering nothing of value and dropping your fps to a single digit.