Valorant Studio Head Teases Everything Upgrading To UE5 Can Do For Them Without Actually Saying What They’ll Do With It

Earlier this week, Unreal Fest opened in Seattle. The two hour opening session for the conference not only featured members of the Unreal Engine team highlighting the work they’ve been doing, but also a few game developers discussing the importance of the engine to their games. One such developer was Riot games – specifically the studio head of Valorant, Anna Donlon.

During her segment, Donlon revealed that Valorant is currently running on UE version 4.27. As she put it, the team has “squeezed literally every ounce of everything [they] could out of Unreal 4”. Having gone as far as they can with that version of the engine, the Valorant team has made the decision to move to UE5.

Donlon goes on to state that the upgrade won’t “significantly change how Valorant looks or performs”, not right away anyway. That makes some sense as there are probably fewer cosmetic things the team would like to do first. That said, it seems unlikely they’d make the shift and then never take advantage of those features at some point.

That’s probably why the rest of her presentation was a whole list of “maybes”. After stating that the Valorant team is “grateful for what Unreal has allowed [them] to do for players” and that they’re “excited about what UE5 can do for [them] in the future”, she goes on to say “maybe those devs are working on something I can’t talk about.” Included in the list of “maybes” is expanding the shooter game’s universe, moving devs and tech around easily to “explore those totally hypothetical new playable experiences”, and so on.

At the moment, it sounds like the plans might be to just add new and interesting content to the game or expand the universe into other games totally, and worry about upgrading the visuals later.