VALORANT’s Episode Seven, Act Two will introduce a new weapon collection called Imperium, Riot announced on Aug. 27. It’s bundled with a huge dragon that’ll make securing the round’s final kill absolutely menacing.
As well as a magnificent double-bladed melee weapon, the exclusive collection includes skins for the Sheriff, Judge, Vandal, and Operator. It also includes a player card, spray, and gun buddy. Each of the gun skins is priced at 2,175 VP, while the melee costs 4,350 VP.
Unlike Elderflame’s fire breather, which only lingers for a moment after scorching the victim, Imperium’s mythical beast finisher engulfs the background and lingers until the round’s end. While it did cause the design team some trouble during development, the bewitching large-scale animation ended up becoming the highlight of the collection anyway.
Flaunting ornamental projections of jade and emerald on its body and a smooth metallic finish to balance the design, the Imperium collection looks lively and premium. Riot revealed that its inspiration was fueled by a combination of dragons from East Asia and Chinese mythology. The artists added an extra touch of life to the variants, which represent different dragon kings in various colors.
“We were inspired by the dragons of the East and jewel materials,” Kerwin Atienza, Art Direction Senior Manager, said. “We worked with our China team and looked at artifacts from China to see how we can incorporate the gold ornaments in the gun design. Our goal was to make the weapons feel like they were treasures imbued with magic.”
The dragons are captives inside of the jewels of Imperium’s weapons, so you’ll be harnessing their mythical powers to give your opponents a grand end, almost like how you’d summon a trapped genie from an enchanted lamp.
The Imperium skinline offers four color variants to choose from: Imperium (Base), Pearl (White), Ruby (Red), and Obsidian (Black), and you’ll probably have a tough time picking one. That said, I can’t ignore how eerily similar the Imperium Operator’s Pearl variant is to the Forsaken Operator’s Gold variant.
Interestingly, the brains at Imperium first wanted to keep the dragon small to avoid any potential issues, but a dragon finisher the size of a snake just wasn’t an appealing idea.
“In our early concepts, we designed the dragon to be much smaller so that it could fit gameplay and environmental constraints of the game,” Anson Tan, Concept Art Manager, said. “However, this made the dragon look more like a snake and gave the opposite feeling it was meant to, which was making it feel larger-than-life.”
If you played VALORANT during its beta back in 2020, you might recognize the Imperium collection from when it was more simple. Shelved at the time, Riot dug up this elegant old idea and redesigned it, catering to the standards of Episode Seven, Act Two.
“We felt the fantasy was strong and that it deserved to be pushed further to bring out its full potential,” Jean Luc Tin Sive, Senior Game Producer, explained. Instead of releasing the simple skinline just like it was, we went back to the drawing board and redesigned it to what you see today.”
The Imperium collection releases on Aug. 29, alongside VALORANT’s Episode Seven, Act Two Battle pass, and the game’s tenth map, Sunset, based in Los Angeles.
