Riot games announced on May 17 that VALORANT will skip Patch 2.10 and go directly to Patch 2.11 in early June due to engine updates. The approximate June 8 date, referenced in the announcement, corresponds with the two-week patch cycle of VALORANT and Riot’s other title League of Legends. This means that VALORANT players will be on Patch 2.09 for a month before the next set of changes go live.
Periodically, we have to update the engine for our game. Due to the nature of these updates, we want to give ourselves plenty of testing time and a stabilization period before shipping it to you. So, there will be no Patch 2.10. The next update will be Patch 2.11, around June 8.
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) May 17, 2021
What do VALORANT engine updates mean?
VALORANT runs on the game engine Unreal Engine 4. This game engine update is not usually a part of patches, as they deal with direct numbers and other gameplay elements.
“Our engineering team doesn’t spend time reinventing the wheel, and our content developers are highly productive with the editor,” Marcus “Riot Nu” Reid, Technical Lead for Content Support for VALORANT, said. “Unreal Engine enables rapid iteration on parts of our game that make it special.”
This engine update may have more to do with the game’s overall performance on players’ computers. More specifically, in its inception, VALORANT was optimized to be played on lower specification hardware. Minimum requirements for VALORANT, according to Riot Nu, are 30 frames per second on the Intel HD Graphics 4000 and an integrated GPU that launched in early 2012. To support these optimizations, specific tweaks were made to the VALORANT engine. For example, the team reworked the engine’s lighting system to make it static for a tactile shooter. This makes lighting less of a factor for the gameplay.
These VALORANT engine updates should address some of the recent issues that players are experiencing with Patch 2.09. Reports of players disconnecting or client crashes with the release of Breeze have been on the rise.
Hopefully this means patching the random crashes we've been getting ever since the Breeze update.
— post-spooky Matt (@TheMattFG) May 17, 2021
Ultimately, Patch 2.09 will be live for VALORANT players for approximately a month. Patch 2.11 will pull through in early June.
