Valorant has only been out for one week, but Riot already has the first update coming for it. This update, Patch 1.01, focuses on improving the game’s performance while also making some minor balance changes. Here’s what you need to know.
Balance changes
Since Valorant has different characters (Agents) with varying degrees of power, balance changes will be a core part of each patch cycle. This patch brings minor nerfs to Sage, Valorant‘s only healer. Sage’s Barrier Orb’s cast range is decreasing from 20 meters to 10. This should help make Sage a little less oppressive on offense.
The Spike Rush mode will also see some balance changes. Each Spike Rush round will now spawn five power-up orbs randomly. There are also several new orbs coming to the game mode:
-
- Health Orb – Grants every teammate health regeneration
- Deception Orb – Applies Paranoia to the entire enemy team to reduce their vision for 10 seconds
- Golden Gun Orb – Grants the player a golden gun that has only one shot with perfect accuracy that always kills
The small but mighty patch 1.01 is here with a few updates focused on improving performance. Read all about it: https://t.co/wVVLeHdf20 pic.twitter.com/gcTJ5TSXbt
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) June 9, 2020
Performance updates
Riot is also working to help Valorant‘s performance on mid to high-end PCs. This focuses mainly on improving framerate drops during combat. Riot states that they have fixed several things causing framerate drops in these situations.
These performance increases should also help lower-end machines as well. Riot has managed to improve CPU Bottlenecks, which should help processor performance on all machines.
Bug fixes
As expected, Riot has also fixed some of Valorant‘s performance-impacting bugs. One of these bugs made it so certain weapon skins wouldn’t load properly into the game. Several other bugs impacting Reyna and Cypher have also been fixed. This should help the game’s performance across the board.
While we didn’t expect patch 1.01 would arrive this soon, it is certainly not unwelcome. It shows that Riot is paying attention to Valorant and will continue making changes to improve performance and balance.
Published: Jun 9, 2020 02:45 pm