Riot confirm Valorant skin ‘devolve’ feature coming in future update

Andy Williams
Valorant Elderflame skin.

Riot Games have confirmed that the ability to toggle weapon skin levels will be coming to Valorant in the future, giving players more cosmetic customization options.

Riot’s Future Earth first-person shooter is brimming with funky cosmetics to meet all tastes. Whether you like the simple and clean aesthetic or something more adventurous, there’s something to tickle your fancy among Valorant’s skins.

Valorant’s Act 2 Battlepass has been praised for the diversity of skins being introduced for the relatively small price of 1,000 Valorant Points. But one area that remains under scrutiny from the community, is Riot’s approach to skin progressions — or more specifically, the currency required to evolve these skins.

While we’ve offered an insight into how the Radianite Point crisis could be solved, it looks like an upcoming feature might offer a solution to players’ Radianite woes.

Vandal Prime skin in Valorant.
Players have the ability to ‘evolve’ their cosmetic, with each level representing a unique progression from the base level of the skin in question.

Riot adding option to toggle weapon skins

Picture this. You invested into the Glitchpop skin bundle and upgraded to the highest level available to unlock each skin variant. As it stands, you have to buy each tier (including additional VFX) before you can reach the alternate skin variants… But what if you’re not a fan of the VFX?

Well, it looks like Riot have considered this, and will be adding the option to ‘toggle’ between weapon skin levels. So if you buy up the highest tier, you won’t necessarily be stuck with that variant and the corresponding VFX.

Valorant Producer, Preeti ‘Preeti’ Khanolkar, replied to a query from a player asking whether it would be possible to devolve an upgraded weapon back to its base level. To which the Riot dev directed them to a recent community-driven Q&A article.

Within the article, Preeti explained that toggling between levels is something that is on the horizon. “What is more feasible is enabling the option for a player to toggle between all the levels of a skin they own. This way, if you own a Level 4 Elderflame Operator, you can still toggle down to Levels 1-3, rather than being stuck only using Level 4.”

“A system like this takes time to build and means that the engineers working on it aren’t tackling other equally important gameplay needs. All that said, we recognize the value in Skin Level Toggling, and it’s something we want to invest in.

While being able to downgrade cosmetics will offer additional customization options to players, it might also offer Riot a way of solving the Radianite Point crisis by reimbursing players with the currency initially spent on evolving their skins.

About The Author

Andy is a former Dexerto games writer, with a passion for competitive shooter titles like CS:GO and Valorant.