Summit says abilities may be VALORANT’s “undoing”

Riot Games’ new tactical shooter VALORANT just finished its first week of closed beta by breaking records on Twitch. But the game’s top content creator is already seeing a potential hole in the game’s potential. 

On stream last night, Summit1g said that the game’s added flavor of having characters with special abilities could lead to the its “undoing.”

“If I’m being 100 percent honest, from a viewer’s perspective, it’s very kind of slow and bland and there are some of these very stupid, boring choke points,” he said. “It’s like this choke point at mid, put a smoke down, put a smoke down, put a smoke down, and then it’s like one big hit almost like Overwatch.”

Summit was trying to compare VALORANT to its closest relatable games in Overwatch and CS:GO. While Summit has personally benefited from VALORANT’s success on Twitch, posting a massive 20.7 million hours watched in the past seven days, he’s played enough to gain a little bit of perspective. 

In just the past week alone, Summit has streamed more than 100 hours of VALORANT game play, and prior to the release of its closed beta, he had an opportunity to participate in an alpha test for the game by content creators.

Fundamentally, he thinks the game may not compare CS:GO as a viewer experience.

“I also realize there’s not as many crazy moments where you’re watching somebody and getting hype about him getting like a three K or something like that,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s going to be as competitively fun to watch for a viewer in tournaments as Counter-Strike is.”

Summit isn’t the only person to express concern that VALORANT might not hold up to CS:GO in its viewer experience. Around the time the game’s closed beta released last week, Dr Disrespect was among the first to make a similar claim.

At the time, he also compared it to spectating Overwatch. While VALORANT is much more comparable to CS:GO, the idea that it’s viewability is on the level of Overwatch make Summit question the sort of effect that character-specific abilities have on the game.

While Riot hasn’t announced set plans for VALORANT as an esport, the developer will surely make some sort of esports structure around it.