Valorant’s weapon skins are some of the sharpest-looking out of any game on the market, with the new Elderflame variants sparking a lot of interest among fans.
While they certainly look very cool, they can be quite distracting- and for a highly tactical, competitive game like Valorant, the devs understand how that can be a problem.
When asked if they ever “considered an option to disable the special animations” or sound effects on weapons, Valorant’s art lead Sean Marino and producer Preeti Khanolkar weighed in.
“Yes, we discussed this a lot before launch,” they revealed. “There are a few things that we had to consider first before we started building any tech to support something like this, including how players would react to custom effects, animation, and sound.”
According to the developers, they’re “committed to fixing anything that compromises the competitive integrity of the game.” They further added that they try to build skins so they aren’t something that players will want to disable, but admit that different players will have different tastes.
“In terms of the feasibility of turning off different skin elements individually, the possibilities become infinitely complicated,” they explained. “What if I want animations but not the effects? How does that look? Or I don’t want the audio, but I want the animations and/or effects?”
With so many potential options for changes, they decided that they couldn’t ensure the quality would remain – and that wasn’t something they wanted to risk.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
That said, it is possible that some sort of toggle system could be coming in the future.
“What is more feasible is enabling the option for a player to toggle between all the levels of a skin they own. This way, if you own a Level 4 Elderflame Operator, you can still toggle down to Levels 1-3, rather than being stuck only using Level 4,” they teased.
However, something like this would take time to implement and would cause engineers to take time away from working on other important gameplay features.
“All that said, we recognize the value in Skin Level Toggling, and it’s something we want to invest in,” the developers concluded.
Hopefully, we end up seeing such a feature sooner rather than later, but don’t expect to see anything like this in the near future. Still, it’s nice to see it’s on the list of things that they want to implement.
