Behind the scenes of Valorant's agent designs

MANILA, Philippines — Valorant, Riot Games’ popular tactical shooter, has captivated audiences worldwide with its blend of innovative mechanics, diverse characters and thrilling gameplay.

As the games celebrates its fifth anniversary since its launch back in 2020, Philstar.com had a chance to talk to John Goscicki, agents lead, and June Cuervo, senior agent designer, during the Masters Bangkok about how each of the now 27 playable agents in the game came to be.

For Riot Games, creating an agent is far more than assembling abilities or attributes. It’s about constructing a cohesive persona and experience that feels authentic both in gameplay and in the narrative world of Valorant.

“There's multiple layers to [design]. There's like, I'll call it like the specific local and then the generic storytelling and all that,” said Goscicki.

Recalling how they designed the most recently released agent, Waylay, the team hired an external consultant that provided invaluable insights into the country’s history, familial relationships and cultural nuances.

He added: “They're helping us get like a lot of high-quality ingredients and they're not telling us how to make the character, but they're giving us the right information.”

The development process is then added by the team’s research. From Googling and watching movies to reading books and listening to music, the team dives deep to ensure characters feel genuine. Additionally, Riot’s multicultural workplace serves as a rich resource. In terms of Waylay, the team had two Thai artists that they could consult as well other Rioters from diverse cultures.

When the game was first launched, Goscicki and the team were focused on providing what he refers to baseline characters that the game needed.

“When you think about a character like Sova, he was the only quote unquote, recon initiator in the game and so like, oh, we think that characters need competition. Let's make another recon style character.  So we got Fade. Now, we're kind of trying to evolve our thinking in terms of like, what new thing [players have] never seen before,” he explained.

With five years of player feedback, gameplay and player interaction have become one of the foundations of agent design.

“We've thought a lot about that on the gameplay side, now that we've had almost five years of context, foreseeing how players interact with these characters, and understanding their role in the game better. So we've taken all of that knowledge from, you know, years of Jett and Raze being in the game, and even Neon and like our other duelists, to make a character that we feel like, you know, fits both the general power perspective of like, you know, how these characters should interact in the game, but also offer something new in the space,” said Cuervo.

Looking into the future of the game, Riot Games is still prioritizing the foundation of Valorant as they move forward.

“Everyone on the design team at Valorant, both on the game balance side and on the new agent side, is really aligned as players that we want Valorant to feel the best it's ever been. And that really extends to every part of the game, from the quality of our agents, the quality of the balance updates coming out, how bug-free the game feels, you know, things like replays. We just want the game to feel like, ‘Wow!’. If you're a brand new Valorant player, this is like, what an incredible, excellent experience this game is and if you're an old Valorant player who's been around for a long time, you feel like it's only just getting started. We want Valorant to feel like the best it's absolutely ever been for everyone who plays it,” said Cuervo.

Valorant is gearing up for its second world tournament this year — Valorant Masters Toronto. Filipino Valorant player Patrick "PatMen" Mendoza and his team Paper Rex hope to keep the trophy within the Pacific region as the tournament’s Swiss Stage begins on June 7.