David Nottingham, a Valorant developer, has delved into Riot Games’ direction regarding the creation and explanation of Valorant’s lore. With the most recent cinematic, Duality, many plotlines have been hinted at including Radianite’s monetization and usage, the Radiant’s goals, and the mystery of the world(s). However, Riot Games and its devs have a larger picture to paint for Valorant to the delight of its fans. You can read the entire excerpt here.
Mr. Nottingham starts the update off with a brief summary of the events that have transpired thus far – there was an incident between Phoenix and Jett that resulted in a huge explosion in Europe. Following that incident, the world was on high alert, with their eyes centered squarely on Kingdom’s Radianite system as well as Radiants, those individuals with special powers. The situation in Morocco escalated yet again with another threat of a bombing, and agents Viper, Killjoy, and Phoenix stepped in to neutralize the situation only to find a disturbing doppelganger on site.
The Valorant developer continues to dive into the reasoning for all these complex plot points, stressing continuity as a huge influence for Riot’s work. Using the term “Narrative Dissonance” as something that the development team has tried to avoid, the lore for Valorant is aiming to display its gameplay as an active approach for storytelling. In layman’s terms, the 5 v 5 normal mode with an attacking and defending team is directly tied to the Valorant universe, with agents aiming to diffuse and initiate the spike. Mr. Nottingham then poses questions to the audience, asking for the meanings of many unanswered questions that Duality has left behind such as which set of agents are the ‘good’ agents.
