Valorant devs respond to calls for multiple skins per game after Black Market bundle reveal

In light of Valorant’s new Black Market bundle reveal, a unique skin line that changes appearance for Attacker and Defender rounds, devs at Riot have responded to calls for broader implementation of such a feature.

For the past three years, ever since Valorant’s release, once you equip a certain skin, you’re stuck with that design for the match. Unless you pick up another gun from the ground, there’s simply no way to swap out custom visuals on the fly, and that’s intentional.

However, Riot just flipped the script on April 10 with the reveal of a new Black Market bundle. While the skins are causing a ruckus due to their realistic designs, there’s one key selling point helping it stand out. When alternating between Attacker and Defender rounds, the weapons change their look. For the first time in Valorant, skins can actually change mid-game.

Taking note of this new innovation, fans immediately took to social media to request a broader implementation of this feature. For many on Reddit in particular, players want to be to choose different skins for each side, essentially doubling up on customization options per match.

Addressing the requests head-on, Valorant’s Associate Art Director Sean Marino outlined why such widespread access to the feature just isn’t feasible at this point in time.

Agreeing with a player to start, Marino confirmed that it would simply require “too much memory” for players to have “2x the amount of skins.” Though admittedly, it’s such an ambitious concept, Riot hasn’t even so much as tested the theory.

“Truthfully, we haven’t done the full load test to see what the memory impact would be if every player could load in with multiple skins,” he explained, “but there are some presumptions we can make.

“We want players to get in the game quickly and not have a bunch of things going on in the background preventing you from doing that- more memory means bigger hardware memory requirement. We are already decently strict on how much available memory the game takes up based on our hardware specs. if we raised that requirement, we could cut out a significant number of players who are at the minimum bar for hardware, and that’s not good.”

One day, things might change as Valorant looks to evolve. Over the years, much like with Valve’s recent jump to a new engine with Counter-Strike 2, there’s a chance older hardware simply has to be phased out as new advancements come into effect. But for now, Riot isn’t looking to trim its possible player count by cutting off certain hardware.

Riot Games

If every player could load in with multiple, highly intricate skin designs for each weapon, it’d certainly be taxing.

“Every player brings 18 skins in game with them (even the default weapons have a skin),” the dev continued. “For 10 players, that’s 180 skins to load into every game. Giving players a default option to have A/D sided skins effectively doubles that number, now you’re at 360 skins per game – we don’t know if we can actually load that in without significant impact, especially on lower-end hardware.”

So while the new Black Market bundle does indeed feature skins that change on each side, it’s a first step for Riot in pushing the envelope. If every player was suddenly able to double up on skins, it could prove disastrous, especially for those on older PC rigs.