Valorant’s Shooting Mechanics Have a Fundamental Flaw

How a tiny flaw dramatically impacts the overall experience, and caused me to uninstall the game

Published in

SUPERJUMP

9 min readSep 25, 2020

When Valorant was first announced, I was initially put off; it came across to me as highly derivative mostly due to the art design (it looked vaguely Dreamworks/Pixar-esque). I was underwhelmed. My immediate reaction might simply be due to the exponential increase in games that look like this — maybe it’s some kind of aesthetic fatigue. Remember when pixel art was (or arguably still is) all the rage?

Chronologically, this was how the style was popularised over time: Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Fortnite, & everything else. — Chronologically, this was how the style was popularised over time: Team Fortress 2 > Overwatch > Fortnite > Everything else.

But constant chattering from my friend about the game convinced me to check it out and see what it really offered. Sure enough, it got me pumped! I mean, just consider the following:

A free-to-play title from Riot Games themselves?
Runs well across almost all kinds of potato computers?
Server establishment across many regions, including India?
‘Lagless’ online gameplay experience?

The last point especially caught my attention.

Even so, I remained silent — I didn’t want my skepticism to destroy my friend’s excitement for the game. In the end though, I still purchased it based on its promise.

The first week of June arrived slowly. We were getting bored out of our minds playing Rainbow Six: Siege. When Valorant was finally released, we didn’t hesitate to install it. And already, I began to like what I saw:

The user interface was slick, comprehensive, and navigable.
The training grounds allowed me to explore all the characters’ powers instead of forcing me to wait until I unlock them. This allowed me to identify which characters I felt comfortable playing as before I unlocked them.
The graphic art presented throughout was impressive.
The gameplay itself is basically Counter-Strike with superpowers. It wasn’t special as such, but it’s a good blend of ideas. It was as I expected, but playing with certain guns felt nice for the first few matches.
The game allowed me to customize my crosshairs! It was a bundle of laughs for a while.

Although all of these factors should make it sound like the game is great, I ran into two issues that justified uninstalling it. Bear in mind that neither of these are related to the past controversies surrounding the game (if you’re curious about those, check out the references I’ve included at the end of this article).

What is the flaw?

As an aside, the subsequent removal of the reference to the “lagless” experience is curious, given the developers proudly marketed it at first. My very different experience could certainly not be described as lagless. This was actually my first reason to uninstall it.

But the nail in the coffin was a key — and fatal — design flaw:

Valorant isn’t a great first-person shooter to begin with.

It’s not that I never enjoyed the experience. But even when I did enjoy it, I actively wondered if I was simply bad at the game. I spent some time adjusting numerous values in the settings menu in an attempt to make the experience feel workable.

Also, I never faced issues with certain mechanics — like using powers. I am pretty good with them in general. For instance, Phoenix, who can control fire, has a defensive attack called Curveball, which blinds any enemy players looking at it when it explodes. It’s a pretty complex attack to execute — half of players end up blinding everyone when using it — but I’ve never had any trouble with it.

The conclusion I drew from this was that the only issue I was having was around the shooting.

It’s surprising to see that nobody I knew ran into issues around shooting. Only me. It couldn’t be that they didn’t identify it because the overarching experience of the game — which contains more than just shooting mechanics — tends to blur the problem, or make it more opaque.

So, going back to my earlier comment: Valorant isn’t a good first-person shooter to begin with. I know, it’s a bold statement. But after a month of playing the game, I’ve concluded that the developers just didn’t get the shooting mechanics right.

Of course, it’s reasonable to point out that every FPS game implements its own flavor of shooting mechanics — it can be tricky to compare the feel of one FPS to another and judge them on the same standards.

That may be true, but Valorant’s shooting mechanics take heavy influence from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. I have a least 600 hours of experience in the latter, so I should have a pretty good idea of how the shooting works, right? Well, sadly, carrying over my CS:GO experience did not completely help. That’s a little strange. So I decided to do some digging.

Digging for evidence

After uninstalling the game, I tried to explain the shooting mechanics to another friend of mine (who happens to be pretty observant about how shooters work in general — him being quite skilled with the genre).

The confusion I felt about the shooting was related to my expectation about how the shots should fire especially while moving. That is to say, the bullet’s trajectory should be influenced by the character’s movement. It’s a common occurrence in 3D games, though not so much in 2D games.

That said, it’s easier to visualize it in 3D! So to simplify things I’ve used an image to explain the concept:

The image here illustrates a moving gun shooting a bullet. Its trajectory is drawn in a 30° straight line.

Let’s assume your gun is aiming to the right. If you fire it while standing still, the bullet should travel in a straight line. But if the gun is fired while you’re physically moving to the right, we should expect the bullet to travel upwards or downwards by at least 30 degrees.

This is why crosshairs exist in 3D games — they give you a visual indication of how much influence your current movement speed would have on the bullet’s trajectory (you can only make these estimations if you set the crosshairs to dynamic). It’s an important point; designers spend a lot of time trying to come up with different cues to ensure the player subconsciously understands what’s going on. Typically crosshairs aren’t the only element that provides these cues or feedback: the sound of the shot also plays a role.

In this case, though the sound isn’t the problem. It’s actually the recoil.

Recoil, ballistics, and root causes

If you do a search on spray patterns and recoil control, you’ll find a ton of guides on them for any first-person shooter with multiplayer. Why? Well, recoil communicates a lot about a game’s “personality” so to speak. That’s crucial to understanding the gameplay approach to take in your matches.

Here’s a great guide on spray pattern and recoil control for the guns in Valorant.

So, that’s all? That’s what’s getting my knickers in a twist? That I simply sucked when it came to recoil control?

Sadly…

Remember, I already said that I come to this game with a CS:GO background. You’d think that adapting to this game’s recoil management should actually be a piece of cake. And it was, actually. So what’s the actual issue then? Let’s dig a little deeper still.

In the context of an FPS game, what is recoil? Fundamentally, it’s animation.

And what are the relevant principles of animation?

Anticipation, action, and reaction.

The image here illustrates another line drawn from the gunpoint to infinity; its angle is 20°, higher than the last line.

Although recoil seems to be the issue, it’s not the root cause of the problem.

Let’s take my earlier diagram and apply it specifically to Valorant.

Imagine the gun is moving to the right. As it moves, it fires a bullet. Our assumption here is that the bullet should travel at a 30 degree angle up or down due to the gun’s movement. Aim is then offset due to recoil.

On the first shot, that’s fine. But in Valorant, something strange happens: subsequent shots follow a path well outside the expected angle. The bullet isn’t confined to a 30 degree window, it instead travels within a 50 degree window. That’s almost 1.7 times the variance I had estimated as being within the normal range.

That might sound like a small number in and of itself. But when you consider it from a gameplay point of view, it means the bullet either nails a headshot or zooms right past the enemy — even though in both cases, I’m aiming exactly the same way.

In this image, the blue and green dots are within the ‘face’ borders, which means you get the points and you kill your rival.

Now, I’m no Srinivasa Ramanujan when it comes to math. But I hope this above illustration is also helpful. It demonstrates how the angles work and how much difference the variances can make for the average FPS gamer.

Your vision — your resting angle — acts as the baseline. It is represented by the blue dot set at 0 degrees. Since we are looking at the center of the dashboard, we know what the resting angle is and what angle we can estimate our shots to be. In this case, any shots that land within the curvy black borders will count as a headshot. Both the blue and green dots will be registered as confirmed hits. But the red dot — the 50 degree angle shot — is outside this zone, meaning the shot effectively misses your rival (or at least the rival player’s collision box).

As you might imagine, in a game that aspires to be a competitive experience — whether we’re talking about simple ranked matches, or even eSports — this kind of variance is everything.

Conclusion

The in-game visual feedback doesn’t adequately align with the actual gun physics. That’s the point.

This matters, because our ability to navigate and interact with a digital environment is entirely dependent on the visual and auditory cues we get from it. It is reasonable to expect that the gun’s animation effectively communicates what it is doing .

So, in other words:

If the crosshair “told” me that my movement is good enough for me to shoot straight shots (which is the first animation we rely on);
And if my gun has completed its recoil cycle triggered from its last shot (which is the second animation we rely on), which further confirms that the offset aim is “fixed”;

… then that’s an ample opportunity to shoot again, yes?

Apparently not when it comes to Valorant.

This scenario makes me wonder if there’s actually a core problem with the synchronization between the recoil time and the recoil animation. I’m getting the visual feedback that says the gun is aimed at the “normal resting angle” but maybe the ballistic offset hasn’t actually caught up with the gun’s visual position on the screen.

Cue X-Files theme music.

This article started with the sense that something just isn’t right with the game’s mechanics. From there, I confined the issue to recoil, and from there, to the underlying difference between visual feedback from the weapon and the actual ballistics calculation. It’s difficult for me to dive even deeper to uncover the precise issue — dear readers, I’ll need to leave the investigation there and hope that developers or game designers (or even other fans who are able to dig down further) can figure it out.

What I will say, though, is that I’m not the only one to have drawn these conclusions.

What’s the overall lesson here, anyway? Given that we’re talking about a shooter, I’d say it’s vital for the developer to nail the core gunplay mechanics. Absolutely everything else is peripheral. This small flaw actually has outsized impacts for players, and could significantly limit Valorant’s ability to become a more widely-played, serious competitive experience.