A small Aussie team was tasked with overseeing its biggest project ever. Here’s the story of how just six local developers collaborated alongside thousands of Riot Games employees around the globe to port its mega-popular Tactical Shooter, Valorant, to console, the first PlayStation and Xbox release in the publishing giant’s history.
When rumblings around a Tac Shooter to rival Valve’s Counter-Strike first emerged, hype began mounting right away. Riot Games, acclaimed publisher behind League of Legends, soon announced its first foray outside of the MOBA genre with said Tac Shooter, then known as Project A.
With development having started all the way back in 2014, it was built from the ground up with the core Tac Shooter audience in mind. Naturally, gamers of that ilk are on PC, a platform where every frame matters and mere milliseconds can make all the difference. At this stage, developers weren’t so much as considering how the game – later to be known as Valorant – could function on other hardware.
That’s where Wargaming comes in. Riot Games acquired the Australian studio, labeling it Riot Sydney, and the first task was no small feat. Bring Valorant to consoles and do it fast.
Riot Sydney begins anew
Riot Games originally had an office in Sydney, Australia for a seven-year stretch from 2013 to 2020. For the most part, the small group oversaw local esports endeavors like the Oceanic Pro League before the competitive circuit and the office were shuttered in one fell swoop, impacting 10 employees all up.
At the tail end of 2022, however, Riot reinvested in the local games industry. The developer announced it had acquired Wargaming Sydney for an undisclosed sum, bringing dozens of experienced staff into the fold to “augment the LoL, Valorant, and tech teams at Riot,” a press release at the time declared.
Peeling back the curtain two years on from this blockbuster news in the Aussie scene, Game Producer Natasha Wolf revealed how the Wargaming crew was immediately thrown into the deep end with one of Riot’s most important tasks at the time.
Riot’s new Sydney arm was enlisted to manage Valorant’s console port right out of the gate. Being Riot’s first endeavor in the console space, there was no pipeline in place, no structure to follow, and no past learnings to improve upon. Devs had to start from the very beginning and get it all up and running in short order.
Acquired in October, 2022, Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent off-handedly said November, 2023 was the target, yet at that stage, they didn’t even have so much as a single “dev kit in the team,” Wolf said during her panel at GCAP 2024 (Game Connect Asia Pacific) that Dexerto attended.
Thankfully, the team had an existing product to look at as Valorant shot up the charts to become one of the most-played and most-watched games on PC. “We already knew what the feature set was,” Wolf continued, “it needed to be functionally the same as what we had on PC.”
Nailing the fundamentals and making it pretty later
Starting the massive project was all about honing in on the core pillars absolutely necessary to bring the PC experience to life across Xbox and PlayStation. The ‘nice-to-haves’ were largely left behind in order to prioritize the essentials.
One such area that was left on the cutting room floor was text chat. While obviously vital for a PC demographic, as behind voice chat, typing is the main method of communication, it wasn’t seen as an absolute pillar of the console experience, at least not to a majority of developers – Wolf admitted there was certainly contention around this choice but she ultimately had to make a firm decision.
“I cut text chat from the feature set,” she explained. “I had done a bit of research and realized the incredible amount of work it was going to cost us. I argued not to release it at launch on console, that was a cost we incurred.”
Another unique challenge in the console space, quirky as it may sound, revolved around the game’s loading screens. On PC, operating on Riot’s own client where they’re the rule-makers, they can effectively do as they like. However, that’s not the case on console, as each platform has its own certification requirements to meet.
One such requirement is that there can be “no static screens,” as Senior Software Engineer Rory Dungan said during a separate GCAP panel. Any game on PlayStation, for instance, is required to “show a spinner or a loading progress bar.”
Even a simple-sounding adjustment like this, however, can cause issues. “We learned that once we had animations in, the game can freeze for a few seconds.” These freezes are enough to fail PlayStation’s certification check, meaning the game can’t launch.
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Similarly, Rest Mode on PlayStation opened another can of worms. While it’s not something players may actively think about, it became a huge focal point for Riot Sydney during the port’s development.
“You’d think it would be easy, but there’s a lot of things that can happen,” Engineering Manager Kayla Panozzo echoed. “What happens if I suspend [on PS5], then I go on PC and get banned before I return to console?” Although an extremely rare scenario, Riot needed to ensure it was checking for even the most infrequent of situations in order to get the console ports approved for launch.
Wolf outlined how as producer on the project, she left a six-month window “at the end of development” purely for “certification requirements” across Xbox and PlayStation. That’s how convoluted of a process it can be merely just having builds approved by the console juggernauts. Certain hiccups will need to be fixed and in fixing those hiccups, new hiccups may emerge. It’s a tricky process to be sure.
Though now with Valorant live on console and the live-service game being regularly updated, launch was only the beginning.
“Console is just as important as PC now”
News of Valorant’s console port was officially unveiled on June 8, 2024, at Summer Game Fest, with the Closed Beta period kicking off just one week later. Obviously, that moment was a huge “payoff” that “felt great for the team,” as Wolf described, but there was still a great deal of work left to do.
Success on console quickly led to a surge in active players, with Valorant Studio Head Anna Donlon recently confirming the game reaches more than 35 million monthly players as of October, 2024. This uptick led to a change internally, with Riot’s global teams now having to remember that “console is just as important as PC,” Panozzo stressed.
“‘Why do I have to fix all these console bugs when I’ve got PC bugs?’ We need to practice this mindset shift,” she explained.
VALORANT is coming to PlayStation 5 & Xbox Series X/S– Closed Beta begins June 14, 2024– Available in United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan (other countries to follow) – PC and Console will NOT have cross-playRegister Here – https://t.co/lkn8tVfTjl pic.twitter.com/6JA0bny8WT
— Valorant News (@ValorINTEL) June 7, 2024
Aligning content drops, bug fixes, and all the rest across platforms is far easier said than done, however. On the PC side, Riot can lock in new builds whenever they like given it’s their client. On consoles, as mentioned, the certification process is a beast and with live-service titles, new updates “can take a week for Xbox and PlayStation to approve.”
This can lead to delays or setbacks along the way as certain changes or additions get pushed back to the next update. As you might guess, players can often be pretty vocal in their frustrations, though Riot takes it on the chin, knowing full well what’s coming down the pipeline. Dungan teased “When the players are happy, they’re playing the game. When they’re not happy, they’re on Reddit, so there will be a bias to the negative point of view.”
There are two key workarounds to the lengthy patch certification process, however. Firstly, there’s hotfixing. This can be the play whenever any game-breaking issues rear their head, but it can’t be adopted for anything of real substance like new skins or map adjustments. “No binary changes, so no code or shaders. Only want to hotfix in the case of critical bugs,” Dungan said.
The other option comes in the long term as Riot gradually improves its relationship with console manufacturers. “If you build up trust with Sony and Microsoft, you can enter a rapid patch,” Panozzo revealed. “After you pass certification a few times in a row, [rapid patch] means you can release a new patch within 24 hours,” effectively getting automatic approval on the respective systems.
Now into the thick of things with console ports thriving and millions of new players actively engaging, is it mission accomplished for the Sydney team? On one hand, yes, the small crew achieved its hectic goal of bringing the mega-popular IP to new platforms with a lightning-quick turnaround and can now ease off the gas a little. But on the other hand, the hard work is still only just beginning. The next ‘long-term’ goal is to bring a degree of parity to consoles and PC.
“We need to align on platforms,” Wolf said. “That’s a long-term piece of work we’re going to do. Right now, if we were to release new social features, we’d have to build them twice.” Moving forward, they’re looking to sync future updates and smoothen out content pipelines to ensure less doubling up on key work.
There’s no word yet on when the console ports may reach wider audiences in other regions, given its limited scope at present, nor is there any insight on mid-gen refreshes with say, a PS5 Pro patch for improved performance. But it’s clear the Sydney crew and Riot at large are treating Valorant as equals across all platforms moving forward.