Valorant, the free-to-play esports first-person tactical hero shooter game, now has servers live in Cape Town

Valorant is a team-based first-person tactical hero shooter set in the near future. Players play as one of a set of Agents, characters based on several countries and cultures around the world. In the main game mode, players are assigned to either the attacking or defending team with each team having five players on it.

Valorant was developed with two main focuses: making tactical shooters and e-sports more accessible to new players, and creating a game that would attract a large competitive scene, while solving many of the points of criticism voiced by professional players from games in the genre. Games aimed at large, active communities and player bases, typically free-to-play games like Fortnite or Riot’s own League of Legends, tend to put an emphasis on a wider array of system performance improvements and game stability rather than newer technologies or graphics as a way of making sure they’re as accessible as possible.

Valorant has been compared to Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with both games having two teams of five attempting to plant a bomb, and Blizzard Entertainment’s class-based shooter Overwatch, as both games have multiple classes and characters catering to various playstyles. Valorant was nominated for Best Esports Game, Best Multiplayer and Best Community Support at The Game Awards 2020. It won the Best Esports Game at The Game Awards 2022.

If you’re from South Africa and using automatic server select, you’ll probably land in the Cape Town server in the game. But you can also select it manually via the dropdown menu in the lobby.

Note that South Africa does not have a Premier zone for the region just yet, so if players in South Africa jump into Premier, they’d still be choosing 1 of the 4 main Premier regions in EU.

So, the good news is the game does not have any overly heavy requirements to play it, and now that it has servers live in Cape Town, it makes it playable from South Africa.

The bad news is the game seems to have some really restrictive requirements around Windows OS (including a kernel driver) and I don’t even see it available on Steam Games, so I won’t be trying it out on Linux.

See https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/dev/valorant-s-cape-town-servers-are-live/
#Blog, #gaming, #southafrica, #technology, #Valorant