Valorant dev explains why every agent will have the same stats

While every playable agent in Valorant will have their own unique set of abilities, a developer working on the game outlined that their hitboxes, health, and other stats will be exactly the same for a good reason.

Valorant’s big reveal on March 2 showed off the game’s first eight agents to the world. Brimstone, Cypher, Jett, Omen, Phoenix, Sage, Sova, and Viper will all be part of the opening roster of playable characters.

Valorant agents are all designed with unique abilities in mind, each bringing their own way of swinging the tides of battle. However, they’ll all have some things in common.

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Every agent in Valorant will be locked with 100 health, and while textures will vary, every character’s hitboxes will be the exact same as well.

While some players fear that this might “limit development,” in a recent Discord AMA, Lead Game Designer Trevor ‘Classick’ Romleski stated that there was a very good reason behind the decision to try and keep the agents somewhat similar in stature.

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“The simple answer is we’ve focused on tight, lethal tactical gameplay,” said Classick. “Changing the health or hitbox [of an agent] has a significant impact on gameplay.”

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Not only would changing the stats of an agent by making their hitbox smaller or health pool larger make them instantly more viable in a game where the time to kill is so low, it would detract from picking an agent for their abilities.

“We want agents to be chosen for their toolkits, not passive stats like this,” he added.

• Read more: When is Valorant coming out? Release date, beta information, more

Valorant’s developers want the focus to be on abilities and gunplay “complementing” each other, and making everything else linear is a good way to do so. This has been a core focus of the game throughout its development, and won’t be changing in the future.

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“You don’t kill with abilities,” said Nicolo Laurent, CEO of Riot Games. “Abilities create tactical opportunities to take the right shot. Characters have abilities that augment their gunplay, instead of fighting directly with their abilities.”

While they haven’t ruled out adding more shields on agents in the future, and there’s healing in-built into the game, no one character will be harder to kill than the other in a pure aim duel.