Riot Games say one of the high points of the update is that new mode Spike Rush gets several new ultimate ability orbs to play with. The flashiest among them seems to be the one shot one kill Golden Gun which also increases a player’s speed while in use. There’s also a new health orb granting health regeneration to your entire team and a deception orb that inflicts “paranoia” on the enemy team for three seconds. Apparently paranoia’s a doozy that hides enemies’ minimap, reduces their vision, and confuses them with fake footsteps and gunfire nearby. In other orb-related news, Sage’s barrier orb is getting cut in half, from a cast range of 20 meters down to 10. You can peep the rest of the performance updates, quality of life changes, and bug fixes in Riot’s Valorant 1.01 patch notes. As for the “ShooterGame” bit, Twitter user Ben Peck happened to spot that Valorant’s still has a directory that might be very familiar to other Unreal Engine developers. Peck says it’s the example project template that ships with Unreal. Peck says that it “makes sense to build off that template, just funny that it probably became a big headache to consider starting a new UE4 project with a fancier name.” Other folks have chimed in that Ark: Survival Evolved and ye olde Plunkbat are the same way. I dug into my local files and sure enough, Ark does indeed have a “ShooterGame” directory, though PUBG’s appears to be called “TslGame”. If you’ve ever been in game development—big project or small—you’re probably plenty familiar with how some things on a project just, ah, never get changed no matter how many times everyone says “we’ll get to that eventually.” As Peck says, from humble beginnings and all. If you’re still working out who to main in Valorant, RPS’s Valorant characters guide can help ya with an overview on abilities and tips.
