Gameplay Journal Entry #2

For this week’s gameplay journal I spent time playing Riot’s FPS game Valorant. It uses the game engine Unreal. According to Henry Lowood, the Unreal engine fits into his definition because it has the capability to handle all of Valorant’s “graphics rendering, audio, physics, and artificial intelligence,” in a single program. Unreal is an extremely popular game engine with the extensibility to reach across many different platforms and genres. Unreal games can be played on systems such as Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Microsoft Windows. Unreal renders the game environment in a three dimensional first person point of view on different maps, each with two “sites”.

It gives the illusion of being real by having objects that would be recognizable in real life, while adding the cartoony, slightly mystic artstyle of the Valorant world. Developers were also able to modify the game’s engine to better enhance assets such as lighting to better fit the genre of game. The Unreal engine was chosen by Riot in hopes that its optimization and stability could help launch the game into the ESports world. Unreal engine had the speed and the user friendly graphics for those running on lower power hardware to help Valorant reach a wide audience base. This also fits into Lowood’s definition of a game engine, as it allows its properties to be modified.

Sources:

Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon. (2016, June 03). Retrieved January 26, 2021, from https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3495/Debugging-Game-HistoryA-Critical-Lexicon

VALORANT’s foundation is Unreal Engine. (n.d.). Retrieved January 26, 2021, from https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/valorant-s-foundation-is-unreal-engine

Valorant Let’s Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW_vZ7VtW3s