Valorant devs open up about Unreal Engine 4 and why they skipped patch 2.10

Riot Games announced a couple of days ago that they will not be following the bi-weekly update schedule this time, and the devs will be skipping Valorant patch 2.10 completely.

However, at the time the Valorant team announced it, not much information was provided as to why the developers will not be providing a significant update for a month.

Periodically, we have to update the engine for our game. Due to the nature of these updates, we want to give ourselves plenty of testing time and a stabilization period before shipping it to you. So, there will be no Patch 2.10. The next update will be Patch 2.11, around June 8.

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) May 17, 2021

Riot did suggest that it was to update Valorant’s engine. This caused more confusion in the community than answered questions.

Fortunately, Valorant’s Principal Software Engineer Riot Nu, took to Twitter to explain some of the things that go behind what they highlight to be “updating the engine.”

Epic releases a new "minor version" of UE4 a few times a year. These updates have all sorts of treats for developers. See UE 4.25's patch notes for concrete examples -- they're 213 pages long. (2/14)https://t.co/LwvHqnVoVZ

— Riot Nu (@RiotNu) May 21, 2021

In one of the explanations the developer wrote:

“I've been getting a bunch of questions about what "updating the engine" actually means. VALORANT is built on a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 4. Epic continuously improves UE4 with features, tools, and fixes. We leverage their hard work to make our game better”

Any minor changes in the base engine can have a significant impact on the final product, and without careful playtesting, the new Valorant patch will have a very high chance of being riddled with game-breaking bugs.

A bug-free gameplay experience is a top priority for Valorant devs

We could realize some of the value from any given update by cherry picking changes, but that doesn’t scale well if we’re going to be servicing the game for a decade or more. Might make a different decision for a traditional boxed product with less live game requirements.

— Riot Nu (@RiotNu) May 22, 2021

The bugs that an engine change brings has to be manually removed, this is one of the reasons why playtesting takes so long once an engine update is done.

Valorant faces a lot of bugs every time a major update rolls by. Especially with new Agent releases, the community discovers new exploits, which the devs have forgotten to notice.

However, this is not true for Valorant alone. Any competitive title that has live game requirements, some minor bugs do at times slip through the cracks.

Riot Nu wrote:

“We could realize some of the value from any given update by cherry-picking changes, but that doesn’t scale well if we’re going to be servicing the game for a decade or more. Might make a different decision for a traditional boxed product with less live game requirements.”

“Since so many changes on an engine update, we skip a patch to allow plenty of stabilization time. We'll spend about a month with all of our developers on it before it ships out to players. If we do our jobs well, you won't notice the engine changed.”

Valorant’s next big update will be around June 8th, and the devs will be skipping version 2.10 completely and bring version 2.11, which is expected to bring Episode 3 Act 1.