Riot’s tactical shooter Valorant launches closed beta in April

Riot Games will launch a closed beta for Valorant on April 7 at 2pm CET / 6am PST.

The beta will initially be available in Europe, Canada, the US, Turkey, Russia and CIS countries, although there are plans to launch it in more regions “if possible”.

In a developer diary video posted below, product manager Anna Donlon said Riot hopes to let hundreds of thousands of players sample the competitive shooter via the beta (sign up here), ahead of the game’s planned summer 2020 release.

The studio says it wants to “keep closed beta as short as we can while getting additional regions online. That said, if we hear a lot of unexpected feedback from players during this period, we’ll reevaluate.”

Beta progression won’t be carried over to the final product, which Riot bills as “tactical shooter meets hypernatural powers”.

The 5v5 character-based FPS was recently shown off in an alpha gameplay video captured from an internal developer playtest.

Riot says Valorant players will benefit from 128-tick servers and a global spread of datacenters targeting under 35ms of ping in major cities.

It claims most minimum spec computers will play Valorant at 30 frames per second, while modern rigs will offer 60-144 FPS.