What you need to know
- Riot Games recently announced Valorant, a new arena shooter that's been in development for six years.
- Riot is holding a closed beta test for Valorant and sign-ups are now open.
- The closed beta is expected to begin on April 7.
Recently, Riot Games, developer and publisher of League of Legends, began announcing a wave of new games. One of these is the arena shooter Valorant, a first-person shooter where different agents have special abilities and the focus is on tight gunplay. Today, Riot announced a closed beta for Valorant, which is expected to begin on April 7 in Europe and North America.
To sign up for the closed beta, you'll need a Riot account. You'll then need to link your Riot account to a Twitch account. Finally, watch for Valorant streams on Twitch. Right now, the closed beta sign-ups are limited to people in Europe, Canada, United States, Turkey, Russia and Commonwealth of Independent States. More regions will become available as servers continue to be set up.
Valorant is planned as a free-to-play game with skins that can be purchased using Valorant Points, in a very similar vein as League of Legends. Any points players purchase in the closed beta will be refunded with an additional 20%. So if you purcahse 5000 points in the beta, you'll get 6000 points when the full game launches. Your progress will not carry over from the beta to launch and Riot notes that the amount of points needed for skins and the price of Valorant Points is not final.
For more information on Valorant, you can check out a recent Reddit AMA with one of the game designers here.
