Valorant Had To Adapt Out Of Fallout 76 If It Ever Wished To Be A Success Console: Reveals Riot Dev

Valorant has been dominating the PC gaming arena for a long time. Console fans have been exempt from this banger of a 5v5 title for Riot Games for four years now. Thanks to the Summer Game Fest, where the game was announced for the consoles.

After an eventful seven-week beta phase, the game was finally fully launched on August 2, 2024. Like any console port, this game was exempt from some of the features that its PC counterpart had. However, the exclusion of one feature actually aided in its huge success. The unavailability of this aspect reminds you of Fallout 76.

The responsibility of porting a game like Valorant to consoles was not a joke. The honors lay on the shoulders of Riot’s acquired Australian studio, which was labeled as Riot Sydney. This small developing studio just consisted of six local developers whose collaborative effort was the result of the arrival of the Riot shooter on PlayStation and Xbox.

Now, this whole porting process was initiated, keeping in mind all the core aspects of the game intact, leaving out the ‘nice-to-haves’ in order to accommodate the essentials. Hence, text messaging or text chat was left out of Valorant’s console port. This is what the game producer Natasha Wolf stated about the exclusion of this feature (via Dexerto):

I cut text chat from the feature set. I had done a bit of research and realized the incredible amount of work it was going to cost us. I argued not to release it at launch on console, that was a cost we incurred.

This may sound like it was straight pulled out from Fallout 76 and pasted directly to the console port of Riot Shooter. This Bethesda action-adventure title is hugely popular, but still, it decided to leave the text-chat feature out of the game. However, Bethesda is finally adding this feature to the game, but it’s adorable and confusing at the same time.

As earlier mentioned by Wolf, text chat is not an essential element of any game. A game can run and operate pretty well despite its absence. Nowadays, players are focusing more on the comms and voice chats than text chats. On PC, it still makes sense as you have ample opportunities to type your messages on your keyboard.

But in the case of consoles, typing is a dream. So, having text chats with the controllers in hand doesn’t really make any sense. However, it was pretty influential at times when players blatantly refused to use voice chat to communicate. On the other hand, the removal of text chats would have also done a lot in decreasing the infestation of the ever-growing toxicity in the game.

Frankly speaking, Riot Sydney had to pull off everything it needed to surface Valorant on the console ASAP. And removing the text-chat feature is really not a big deal at all. What’s your opinion on it? Share your views with us in the comment section.