Valorant is switching to Unreal Engine 5 and finally adding replays

Riot Games is planning to switch Valorant, its popular first-person tactical hero shooter, over to Unreal Engine 5 in July. The engine upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 is part of a number of new changes coming to the shooter over the coming months, including a replay system in September.

Valorant has been running on Unreal Engine 4 since a beta of the game originally released in 2020, and Riot Games has been using Unreal 4 for more than 10 years to build the game. The upgrade to Unreal 5 will arrive with patch 11.02 at the end of July, and Riot is promising it shouldn’t disrupt gameplay.

The game’s overall look and feel should be similar, and Riot says the engine upgrade will improve framerate performance and make patch downloads faster in the future. It’ll be interesting to see what else this engine upgrade unlocks, particularly whether Riot will improve character models and animations in the future. Valorant players that log in while patch 11.02 is live will get a special gun buddy to commemorate the upgrade.

The second big upgrade coming to Valorant later this year is the long-requested replay system. It will arrive on PC first with patch 11.06 in September, followed by a release on console later this year. The replay system will let you analyze recently played competitive games at launch, and Riot is looking at adding more modes later.

The replay system should help players report cheating or bad player behavior in Valorant, and Riot is also adding multi-factor authentication to the game to help with smurfing in the competitive modes — where higher ranked players log into accounts to boost them. You’ll also soon be able to report accounts that are abusing rank or matchmaking.

Valorant’s upcoming 11.0 patch later this month will also add a new map to the game, and it will be available in the competitive mode on day one. During the initial patch cycle of two weeks, rank rating (RR) losses on this new map will be cut by 50 percent while Valorant players get used to playing this new map.