Teams all across VALORANT wanted to share their thanks to the community for 2022—before we head into 2023. Thanks from the entire VALORANT squad!
Art
Hello everyone. As 2022 is winding down to a close, let's reflect on the visual journey VALORANT artists have shared with the VALORANT community. This year we have shown a wider and deeper view of the VALORANT world than we have before to players.
You got to see VALORANT Agents hanging out on vacation with vibrant illustrations in the Lunar New Year event. We evolved our homepage’s scenes to show everyone elements of the storytelling or upcoming events in the VALORANT ecosystem. We shared new visual aesthetics for an Earth in an alternate dimension through new Maps and Cinematics with the launch of Pearl. Fade reveals that provide visual exploration of her nightmare with her cinematic reveal and illustrations. You were also able to refresh our User Interface designs in the live game…and that was only the start! Finally, some of our VALORANT artists had their first public presence at the Light Box event this year. The character concept team gave everyone a peek behind the curtain to share how they create the designs for our Agents.
For VALORANT 2023, you will definitely see new Agents, maps, and premium content but a few other amazing visual surprises as well. Stick with us to see what’s coming next year.
Audio
In 2022, we brought you our first talking gun skin and let you jump onboard the VLT/R with KAY/O in the Sting audio logs. Fade made things nice and quiet so she can trigger your nightmares. Neon burst onto the scene with crackling energy and Harbor made a splash. We brought new music into the menus, maps, and the Champions skin. Also…there was the Neptune skinline! Thanks so much for playing and sharing your feedback with us this year. And hey, my favorite sound in the game is quality comms, so be good to each other in 2023!
Characters
Hey everyone, from all of us on the Character Team we just wanted to say a big thank you for playing this year. With Neon sprinting in, Fade tracking down enemies, and Harbor splitting up maps, it's been a wild 2022. ❤ We hope you all enjoy our lil agent doodles, and we are looking forward to shaking up 2023 with even more Agents.
Competitive
In 2022, the Competitive team introduced a new rank, shared a sneak peek of our "path to pro" team competition system called Premier, and made a number of improvements and additions to player behavior and matchmaking systems in order to create safer, fairer matches.
We have no plans to stop in 2023. Please continue to let us know what you want to see from us and share your ranked stories. Expect to see more updates about Premier (and an opportunity to play!!!) later in 2023.
Creative
Hey! Creative folk spend so much time living in the future (like we are already excited for all the things we are working on for next year), it’s a little nuts to pause for a minute and look back on all the things we delivered to players this year.
Brimstone really should consider putting a lock on the door of his office in The Range, but thx to his poor security protocol, we got to share a lot of snippets of Agents’ lives as well as letting players witness VALORANT battling a mysterious blackmailer before tracking her down, which led to the Fade launch video debut during VCT.
It felt really special to join so many players who tuned in to watch her debut as a new Agent.
This was capped off with a major highlight for many of us—the opportunity to come to VCT in Istanbul and meet with players for the first time. It really is you who continues to inspire us in coming up with amazing stuff, so expect us to keep building out the VALORANT universe in 2023 with new Agents, maps and other cool stuff such as the [REDACTED].
Data Ops
This year, we had the opportunity to build the new Smurf Detection system that is now live across all regions! It was awesome seeing the community react to these new features and have already seen a substantial decrease in the number of unfair matches that happen because of Smurfs. Next year, we will be releasing our 2nd version of Smurf Detection that will make our automated detection faster and more accurate (no Smurfs slipping through the cracks). Thank you all for being patient as we continue to improve this system to ensure you have fair and competitive matches when you play VALORANT!
In addition, our team also put a lot of time and effort into improving the Data Warehouse that all of VALORANT’s development teams use to review game performance, balance, competitive integrity, and much more. We are excited to continue this work to make sure our teams can launch all of the new features they have planned for next year.
Esports
Thank you to all the esports fans who supported us during the past year! Across Game Changers, Challengers, Masters, and Champions—the VALORANT Champions Tour continued to set new records and break down barriers all over the world. The energy and passion you brought to events large and small amplified every moment, creating our biggest season yet.
Throughout the year, the ideas you shared helped guide us as we sought to build a new model that would meet the growing demand we saw in every corner of the globe. Now, VCT ‘23 is right around the corner. Our esports teams have been busy planning for LOCK//IN, preparing our studios for the new International Leagues, and getting ready for an even bigger Champions. It’s gonna be awesome and we can’t wait to share it with you!
Foundations Area
Thank you all for your support this year! Our teams have been hard at work this year making sure the core VALORANT experience is stable and meets the quality you expect. Our Release team has helped ship nearly 20 patches this year and ensure fixes get out in a timely fashion. The Core Services team has added servers all across the globe and has helped ensure the game is up and available throughout the year. Our Performance team has helped increase our server tick rate stability and helped deliver a massive client side performance boost for CPU-bound machines earlier this year. Our Content Support team delivered an engine upgrade that brought performance updates and has been helping our content teams with developer tools and systems to build awesome new content. Our Build team has been focused on keeping our developer processes smooth by increasing the speed and reliability of our internal systems which speeds up developers being able to view their changes in game.
With VALORANT focusing on some major beats next year, we’re focused on making sure our tools and pipelines get those awesome features out to you quickly and at a high quality for 2023!
Heartbeats
In simple terms, Heartbeats is a delivery team. While the Premium Content team creates weapon skins, Heartbeats is the team that brings them into the store and into your collections. And not just skins—Heartbeats brought you over 500 pieces of in-game content across buddies, cards, sprays, weapons, and titles in 2022 alone!
A lot goes into releasing content into the wild, and while we’re pretty good at what we do, we aren’t perfect. (Looking at you Widejoy) But seeing your reactions to everything we put out is incredibly rewarding and pushes us to make every piece of content feel special. We’re very excited about what we have coming up in 2023 and can’t wait for you all to see it very soon!
Insights
We can’t believe it’s been another year and 2022 is coming to a close. Our team is continually hard at work making sure that VALORANT is fun to play for everyone by representing your voices through data. Insights' main purpose is to make sure everyone on our team knows what you think about our game and how changes impact you, whether that’s through our playtests and surveys or how the latest patch has affected the balance of our game (looking at you, Chamber).
We’re always busy making sure that the game is fun for everyone, whether you’re just starting to learn or a seasoned pro, and if it’s not fun we help the team identify why. And for all the super secret stuff that we won’t spoil for you yet, we promise that players like yourselves get hands on early, so that you can tell us what you loved and what can be improved (a good example was our Premier Alpha in Brazil!). Thank you for playing our game!
P.S. If you ever get a survey from VALORANT and wonder if your responses get read, know that our team reads them. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
Maps
A new map, several updates, map pools, esports activations, and live story… Thank you all for coming along the Maps ride this year. It was amazing seeing everyone’s reaction to Pearl and watching its play evolve over the last several months. We loved the new strategies you all came up with as maps and meta shifted. And we got to witness some incredible moments in VCT this year, #ziplines. We make the maps, but YOU make the stories. Hope you all had a great year in VAL and are looking forward to some Map surprises coming soon!
Modes
Modes team spent 2022 building out our team and doing R&D on the types of experiences we want to bring to VALORNT players. While we’ve been heads-down for most of the year, we are excited to end the year with the release of the Swiftplay Beta!
The Modes team is eager to share the results of our experimentation this year. We’ve taken some of the learnings from VALORANT’s original development and have a new, unique experience. We’re excited to see how players will utilize VALORANT’s Agents and weapons in this new, fast-paced mode when it’s ready to release.
We can’t wait to show you what’s to come in 2023, including a highly-requested mode update.
Premium Content
This year, we created even more skins, Battlepasses, and accessories to add to our already huge arsenal of cosmetics. We also shipped some of our most ambitious skins, like Protocol 781-A, Prelude to Chaos, Xenohunter, Champions 2022, and ChronoVoid. We took some bets by adding more skins to sets you already loved—Reaver, Ion, and RGX. Thanks for giving us a chance, noticing our memes, telling us what you love, being honest (even if it’s saying our skins are chalked), and helping us support VALORANT. It’s honestly a dream working on this game and bringing so much joy to this community.
Progression
This year, the Progression team has helped release some amazing event passes, gameplay rewards, and new systems for randomly equipping your favorite gun skins (more to come on that soon!). We've also been working hard behind the scenes on new features designed to help players see their growth in VALORANT and flex their skill in new ways.
Crafting new experiences to celebrate the time you spend with us in VALORANT and reward the creative gameplay we've seen as the game has evolved is something we're incredibly passionate about. We're looking forward to sharing and building these features with all of you next year, so keep an eye out for updates!
Store
In 2022, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes improving the foundation that powers player investment, expanding our Rewards Programs through Xbox Game Pass integration, introducing a new way to access content in VAL through content codes, and supporting our regular premium content releases. Thanks for keeping us on our toes this year during big moments like Reaver, RGX, and Pride and for sharing your Night.Market stories—whether they were wins or losses.
We're particularly excited for players to get their hands on some amazing Xbox Game Pass benefits that we've been working to deliver in the near future. It's an incredibly hype time to be a gamer and we sincerely hope all Xbox Game Pass subscribers out there enjoy access to all Agents and boosts to gameplay reward.