Update: We've confirmed with Riot Games that this rumor is false and at this time there are no plans for ties between League of Legends and Valorant. Original article below.
There’s a lot about Riot’s upcoming FPS Valorant that’s still being kept under wraps, but according to one source, the developer has revealed one bizarre weapon skin based on the quirky League of Legends joke character, Urf. Valorant is already being talked about as major competition for games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch, despite so little being known about it.
Previously known as Project Ares, Valorant is just one of several games that Riot recently announced it’s working on. The League of Legends developer is also working on a new fighting game and a dungeon crawler, as well as the card battler Legends of Runeterra, which is currently in beta. If that wasn’t enough, the developer also recently launched a whole new division devoted to making tabletop games. Aside from Legends of Runeterra, Valorant looks to be the furthest along of any of Riot’s new projects, or at least the one players have the most information about.
Recently, more information about what sort of skins players can expect from Valorant at launch has come to light. According to a video from Qwixzo, the YouTube channel of IGN Nordic staffer Nick Nijland, Riot is adding a weapon skin to Valorant based on Urf the manatee. Urf is a joke character that Riot claimed was going to be added to the game as part of an April Fool’s Day joke, but has instead become the mascot of League of Legends’ Ultra Rapid Fire mode. Qwixzo reports that the Urf skins will be based on the appearance of NERF guns.
However, it also seems that weapon skins may be the most significant cosmetics coming to Valorant, at least for a while. According to Qwixzo, the game will launch without character skins. In the video, Nijland claims that Riot doesn’t want to obscure the silhouettes or hitboxes of the heroes by adding lots of character skins, similar to how Apex Legends offered only simplistic skins for its heroes when it first launched.
The lack of character skins in Valorant might be a turn-off for some players, but others will definitely appreciate the inclusion of the Urf weapon skins. Urf is a pretty niche character, and anyone who’s going into Valorant without having played League of Legends will likely have no idea what the skins are even referencing. While it’s good to see Riot throwing in a treat for some of its biggest fans, the developer will probably need to offer quite a bit more to keep entirely new players from feeling left out.
Source: Qwixzo/YouTube