Valorant is switching to Unreal Engine 5 and finally adding replays

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. 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 mode ... Read full article.