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Title: Valorant is finally adding replays and upgrading to Unreal Engine 5

Date: Fri, 30 May 2025 17:39:31 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/valorant-i...

The hugely popular first-person shooter game Valorant is getting some long-
awaited upgrades as the game approaches its 5-year anniversary. In the latest
dev update, the Valorant team announced the long-anticipated replay feature.
TheyΓÇÖll function about the same as replays in other online shooters like
Counter-Strike 2, allowing players to revisit their previous matches and
watch them from the perspective of any player in the game or from a free-
roaming camera. Replays will initially launch on PC with patch 11.06 in
September and will come to consoles later in the year.

After initially developing and updating the game in Unreal Engine 4 for more
than ten years, the dev team announced a port to Unreal Engine 5 with patch
11.02 around the end of July. The Valorant devs say this will bring higher
frame rates and faster future patch downloads without changing the current
gameplay feel. In their video update, the team teased that moving to Unreal 5
will enable a whole host of possibilities in the future.

Competitive players will take particular note of new anti-smurfing
initiatives. Smurfing is the practice of higher-ranked players using lower-
ranked accounts to gain a competitive advantage by playing against players
far below their skill level. In an attempt to further curb this behavior,
Valorant will be asking suspicious accounts to complete multi-factor
authentication and is exploring requiring it on all competitive accounts.
These guardrails will launch later this year with more details to come.
Additionally, users who wish to report other players for smurfing can now
select a specific "Rank/Matchmaking Abuse" category to help the better
identify those accounts.

The update also showcased some gameplay balancing measures involving
character abilities, teased a new competitive map and highlighted the
teamΓÇÖs vision for the future of Valorant in esports.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/valorant-i...
upgrading-to-unreal-engine-5-173931808.html?src=rss

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