Cover-Credits:
- Valorant developers offered insights on how they created the game's new snowball fight event.
- The new game mode was inspired by Senior Game Designer Bobby Prochnow's childhood experiences with snowball fights.
- The event is live and free-to-play for all players and it also has an earnable gun buddy if you try the game mode out.
Valorant recently received its Winter Wonderland update with a new limited-time game mode. Senior Game Designer Bobby Prochnow and Senior Producer Jared Berbach talked about how Valorant can be stressful. The team is currently working on several game modes and prototypes that players can have fun with. The new snowball fight mode was originally a prototype idea that was loved by the Valorant dev team, and the team has been working on it for a long time to push it out for the winter holidays.
Prochnow’s Snowball Fights from Childhood Inspired Valorant’s New Limited-Time Event
Image by Riot GamesThe senior game designer revealed that the snowball fights from childhood inspired the new Snowball Fight game mode. He talked about how Valorant has a sense of lethality, and it being the holiday game mode, he wanted it to recreate the joy of receiving gifts. Recreating the sense of wonder and togetherness of Christmas was important to the team.
When asked if the new event’s development had challenges along the way, he talked about how the team wanted to keep the collisions with snowballs fairly small. But the team also had to make it somewhat easy to target other players with snowballs. It led to a bug where “the player collision would sometimes sweep across the entire map right when the snowball was shot. The result was every time you fired a snowball; there was a decent chance you'd kill someone else all the way across the map.”
RELATED: A Valorant Battle Royale Mode is Allegedly in Testing
Similar Game Modes Are In The Works
The Valorant dev team is working on and prototyping new low-stress game modes that accompany the competitive experience fans expect from the game. The goal is to create a game where players access high-octane games and wind down after long sessions. Valorant seeks to be a game where players can “simply hang out with their friends of all skill levels to have some casual fun.” More modes like the snowball fight will be headed to Valorant in 2021, as confirmed by the devs.
The team is also offering some free cosmetics for players who log in during the game. You can grab a free gun buddy if you play the new game mode. There are new skins available with part of the Winter Wonderland bundle featuring a set of unique skins for weapons and melee.
RELATED: Riot Unveils Valorant BlastX and Winter Wonderland Bundles
