Hero shooter Valorant will soon receive an icy new set of skins called the Cryostasis line just in time for the winter season. Weapon skins are an important part of Valorant for players, allowing them to express themselves and diversifying the user experience beyond what agent they choose to play. Alongside their unique appearances, Valorant skins also come with special animations and effects, in the past featuring things like flames or colorful lights.
Each skin line in the game draws inspiration from different aesthetics - some Valorant skins like Recon are more realistic, army-inspired pieces, while others are more sci-fi or fantasy driven. The new Cryostasis line is an industrial, sci-fi set that's all about ice, and aims to replicate in-game tension as frost slowly begins to cover the weapons in-between firing. When players utilize their weapon, the accumulated ice will break off in a satisfying animation.
Valorant's Senior Manager of Game Production Preeti Khanolkar and Associate Art Director Sean Marino sat down with Screen Rant for an exclusive interview where they discussed creating the Cryostasis line, the skin design process as a whole, and future plans for in-game skins.
Screen Rant: We've had an iconic fire-based weapon with the dragon skins that were in-game and finisher animations with flames as a motif, like Prelude to Chaos. But ice has been less of a recurring theme. What made now the right time to dive into that aesthetic?
Preeti Khanolkar: It's kind of funny. Way before the game launched, we tested skins in a limited capacity. But we also did a survey with players about what types of skins they generally like? I remember our researcher told us that players love elementals. Sean here was like, "No, this can't be real," but when we actually got the results back, it was sci-fi, fantasy, and elementals through the roof.
But I don't know that anything we have made has been purely elemental. I don't know that we even think of Dragon as fire.
Sean Marino: The worst thing we've made is the Smite gun skin. [Laughs] It's a very easy thing to just check off your list: fire, water, electricity, poison, all these kinds of things. Smite was definitely one of those, which was not executed well.
Like Preeti was saying, the intent wasn't that we need to make an ice skin. It was just something that happened to be thematic and had a lot of context in history behind why we wanted to go this route. And then it just so happened to be a very serendipitous thing, where we didn't intend for it to be releasing in winter, but it makes sense.
Also, because we hadn't ever done an ice skin before, we actually had a lot to lean on from the Icebox map. We're like, "How do we even execute this visually?" And then we just looked to the Maps team, and we actually had some examples.
Could you talk a little bit more about the history behind why you wanted to do this skin?
Sean Marino: Yeah, this is the good scoop. This is like peeking back into 2016 Valorant, when we were still trying to figure out what the IP was. We had a number of different things that we were trying out, and one of them was our base weapons. This idea came from our concept artist at the time, which was for the weapons to have some sort of mythological or historical context.
One of the ideas he had was for the gun that eventually became our operator, which was based off a Russian sniper. Basically, the story goes that this guy sat in the snow for days on end, just waiting to find his target, and he would actually eat snow so that his breath wouldn't be revealed. It was this whole idea of someone who was literally just sitting there becoming completely frozen so that he can find one target that he had to get.
The concept artist had a name for it; the Northern Wind, which I think was this guy's nickname. That's a really cool concept of snow and frost taking everything over when you're sitting still. That's what actually went into the entire design of this; when you're not firing or not using the weapon, you're just sitting there and frost will start to grow or form on the gun. These icicles will start to form.
The other one is a little bit more technical, and a little bit serendipitous. Even before I joined Riot, there was this really awesome environment I had seen in the game art community that had really cool technology at the time. This artist had an ice cavern with these chains, and there was a boat or something like that, and he showed a tech demo of how he would paint on these chains. They would start to form icicles on them, and everybody's mind was blown. They're like, "How the hell did you do that?"
Cut to two years later, this is now our Maps Lead on Valorant. I didn't even know this at the time. I looked at that gif, and I saw his name. I sent him a message and was like, "Wait, how did you do that?" Now, I have access to the secret. I knew this was technically possible, because I'd seen it 10 years ago, and it also has this tie back of a story I thought was really cool.
The ice building on the weapon seems to represent tension building in matches. What made you want to chase that feeling with this skin?
Sean Marino: I think that goes into the idea of how we want players to play the game. It's like, "Take your time. Be deliberate." If you look at your gun, and it never has ice on it, maybe you need to calm down and just relax for a second.
Preeti Khanolkar: If you fire too fast, the snow just falls off. And if you tap, with the Vandal specifically, you'll see this beautiful snow effect. It's like a tree shaking from the wind when it's got snow on it. It's more beautiful when you tap.
Sean Marino: It's a little bit opposite of what we've tried in the past. Because normally, you expect something big to happen when you fire. You have a muzzle flash or dragon roar—and we have done that before, where we would try these transitional effects so that as you fire your gun, something is added to it. In this case, we're doing the opposite. We're taking something away.
We had to test and see how that feels. Do players want the ice to always be present? Is that the good-looking version of it? Or do you want it clean and without? That was a really fine line that we had to try and find the balance within, because you could argue that you don't like the weapon because the cool thing is removed from it when you fire. But I think that tension building and slow, deliberate process is what makes it makes sense.
Is it hard to balance having a really cool idea, and then executing it so it's not too distracting for players?
Pretti Khanolkar: Yeah, we generally want the artists to start with what is going to look cool and feel cool. Then we'll leverage our design play test team, or DPT, to play test maps, agents, balance changes—you name it. I think it's four hours a day, and it's pretty rigorous. We'll always give them a list of skins and say please use these. And sometimes we call out specifics, and other times we're intentionally vague because we want them to react how a player would react.
In this case, we gave it to them, and they definitely provided a lot of feedback. We definitely don't want you to be sitting there, being like, "There is a thing that is pulling my eye as this ice develops." We've had other things similarly, which we call idle effects. The dragon breathing, and his scales, is one of those idle effects. Singularity had the rocks, which would shake a little if you sat still for long enough. We actually removed that; we didn't ship that because we found it too distracting.
Sean Marino: Ion has them. And you just have to balance how much that actually adds to what you're seeing.
I think with this skin, the big thing that actually caused a bit of a distraction was the first moment that you fire and all the ice breaks off. We had to look and see how the value of that was actually pulling your eye away from your crosshair. It's snow, it's bright white, and you're attracted to it. It was one of those things that, when you wait as long as you can and then fire, your eyes are immediately drawn to the bottom right or left of the screen. And that was an easy fix, like making it not as bright. Maybe it doesn't make as much sense, but we had to work that into the design to make sure that it wasn't distracting. It sounds simple, because it is. You just take that value, pull it down, and now it's fixed.
Preeti Khanolkar: I think identifying the problem is important. Sean will be able to look at it and explain. Sometimes all we get is, "Hey, I didn't like this. It was distracting." We're like, "Oh, tell us why. Give us a video." People will give us a play test clip, and Sean's able to look at that and say, "Alright, I think it's the value of the snow." Whereas I'll look at that and be like, "Oh, is it just like too big?"
If you remember the Xenohunter skins, we had a big thing where people were like, "These are really distracting." We needed to ask, "Is it the movement on the screen? Is it the size of the screen? Is it the bright red indicator on the bottom? Is that too big?" People don't know, and that's how players are gonna be. They just don't like it. So, you have to take away elements at a time and say, "Did this fix it? Did that fix it?" We have to take our best guess sometimes and put ourselves in our players' shoes.
You bring those elements together, and that's why we say skins take a long time. We're testing this all throughout, and eventually landing on the best experience for the skin that at the same time doesn't violate competitive integrity. Because anybody can pick up your gun, and we don't want them to be like, "Oh, I just like threw the round because of the stupid gun I picked up."
Sean Marino: We have to find a balance between what the artists want and what is right for the game. I think where we run into this with these idle effects is with audio, where we might want to go all out. And in this case, when the snow and ice and all those effects start spawning, you might want to] hear a little bit of an ice crackle or a snow crunch or something like that. And that's just a very hard thing to commit to doing. Because if you're standing there doing nothing, and that sound interferes with you hearing a footstep, that's not good.
In general, do skins ever play a role in how maps and characters are designed? I'm curious how the inspiration process generally starts for that.
Sean Marino: We are usually the last ones in that whole collaboration, if it happens. We're trying to find a way to make things a little bit more cohesive so that you can have this feeling of, "Hey, this map came out. This new character is released, and there's this skin bundle that kind of makes sense."
We also just have to be very deliberate about things that we're canonizing because skins live in this alternate universe. For us, it's like selling a fantasy to somebody through the gameplay, and you don't want to go too far outside of the realm of what is feasible, which is silly to say because we have people who throw fire and have magical creatures, but we just want to be deliberate about that stuff.
For us, what's actually fun is to integrate our content into the maps when it makes sense. One idea we didn't really pursue, but it was a fun idea to think about, was when we released the Protocol gun skins earlier this year. We thought it would be interesting to have the voice for that be KAY/O's voice, but it ended up just not working out. We were like, "That doesn't really make sense. There's no reason; we're just trying to shoehorn something in."
One of the small, fun things that we did is like when we released Gaia's Vengeance, we put a tree on Haven just to indicate that it was there. Or when Protocol was releasing, we put that Do Not Fail sign on Split. We try to have fun and celebrate some things coming out. But there's less of everything working together.
Preeti Khanolkar: We also start skins about a year and a half or two years before they release, so the timing doesn't always work out for us. It'll happen that we hear there's an opportunity, but we would have needed to start six months ago if we wanted to make it work.
But skins have sometimes helped influence certain things in the game. And we share intel, like Marino mentioned. We took inspiration and tech from Icebox's executing techniques to figure out how to make ice here. The library's all shared, and artists don't want to just start from scratch. If they could use something as a basis, they might be like, "I could use this effect to make it look like whatever over here." That did happen with Killjoy.
Sean Marino: And technically with ChronoVoid and Harbor, though I think they're both accidental. Again, another peek behind the curtain here. You might think we're geniuses, but there's a lot of happy accidents. You might look at that Killjoy and Glitchpop example and be like, "That makes total sense. They have a cyberpunk weapon and a character that has the cyberpunk materials." But both of those just happen to release at the same time. There was a little bit of, "Hey, look at that'' where they kind of reached that convergence point. But the release of them around the same time was simply when we each planned on doing it.
That's where we actually dug into that opportunity with Harbor and the ChronoVoid trailer that we had. We were just like, "Here's this agent who has this whole Indiana Jones-esque, artifact-hunting job. And then here's this artifact-ish weapons skin, so maybe let's tie those two together." That was just a good opportunity, but it was not planned from the beginning.
Preeti Khanolkar: Yeah, we wish. I think most of our planning is probably with Champions, but that doesn't involve a map or an agent. That's like, "There's a big eSports thing coming, so how do we support that?"
In terms of agent-specific skins, are there any future plans to release more that dive into the identities of the different agents? Or is that too narrow of a focus?
Sean Marino: We were just talking about this yesterday. Agents are very free to use when it comes to skin, so in a lot of our Battle Pass skins, we're like, "Cool, let's do this one skin that uses a color scheme or visual shade language that an agent uses."
And you're right, it's harder to be like, "You've done 86 Jett ones, but none for Brimstone. Where's the love?" I think we just have to find that balance. The wider pool does give us more opportunity to repeat certain things, which we did with Valorant Go!, for example. That was a really good opportunity where we had five agents we could do. I think at the time we were doing it, there were like 12 agents total, so we could do two sets. But now that we've got more than 15, technically we could do a third. That keeps expanding, so I think it does give us a little bit of opportunity.
For some players, if it's ever a case where we release a skin themed around an agent that they don't like, maybe there's a hope that it comes out for one that they do like in the future. There's no guarantee, but we have to be able to serve everybody.
Preeti Khanolkar: The way we think about making the agent-specific guns and their contracts is really like, "What if this agent had a gun?" What was really fun was the trailer with Maxbot, where they're all fighting in the range. Phoenix walks in with his pistol with the fire on it. We think of that as Phoenix's pistol. If he bought it or carried his own personal weapon, how would he treat it and design it? That's our way of saying something is in that agent's style.
When we were doing Reyna's, I remember very specifically struggling with what it could look like. I forget how it happened, but it was basically like, "What would Reyna buy? Maybe this high-end, beautiful gun that would be her silence pistol." I certainly think players associate certain guns with certain agents, but sometimes that is just players making their own connections. We are not intentionally doing that.
Sean Marino: The example that we always use for that is how Viper remains probably an entire green gun skin load out. Whether it is the variant from Prelude to Chaos or Viper's shorty, there's something there that if you want that as a way to represent your affinity for an agent, that's also available through things that aren't directly tied.
I was actually talking about the literal sense. Like the Team Ace skins, where it's like, "Here's a picture of the agent that you like with their weapon." We mix and match.
Valorant's premium content is crucial for maintaining player interest in periods between agents and maps being released. Are there any times that there's added pressure for premium content design? Or is it always a high-energy, high-pressure situation?
Sean Marino: I think it's really interesting to see player reactions when it comes to things like this, because our cadence has very little variance in it. You can expect something new every patch, or every other patch. We'll release this massive skin, like Prelude to Chaos, and then follow it up with something a little bit smaller. And then you'll see some players on Twitter being like, "What the hell? When's the next time they're gonna release a good skin?" We just did!
In those instances, it's tough. Because you look around, and you're just like, "The team's kind of busting their ass." They're trying to get this stuff out, and they're trying to celebrate everything that they're doing. In some cases, they need a break. That is why there's a bit of a variance in there. Also, players can't spend infinite money. When we do release things that are of a lower caliber, in terms of the feature set it has or the gun availability, that is good for some players who want certain things that may not cost as much. But it does kind of suck to see players be like, "This is ass! Valorant's a dead game' they're not releasing anything good." Then someone does some fan art, and they're like, "You should hire this person." It's like, c'mon! [Laughs]
Preeti Khanolkar: There's definitely pressure, right? Marino touched on this, but it's not just that the team needs a break. We want to have some variety, and not everybody wants the top -tier, evolving, crazy Dragon. Some people want some more simplistic stuff. We're also trying to serve a diversity of tastes, because there's people out there who want their Wastelands and there's people out there who want their high fantasy. For everything that one person loves, someone else is gonna hate it. Even some of the most popular stuff! There's people out there who don't like RGX or Reaver.
We're also trying to adapt to the feedback that we get, and people are in their own little circles of, "All my friends think this sucks, so why isn't it obvious to you guys?" But it might actually be quite popular with other people. Something we're doing that I think is interesting is that we're trying to talk more to influencers and get more of their feedback. They're also just one person out of a billion, but it helps color our perspective. It's like talking to our design team and asking them to elaborate on what's distracting. In the same way, when someone says, "This sucks," we can ask why they think it sucks.
Sometimes they're like, "I don't like sci-fi, so this sucks." But you never would have liked it. There's no world where I could have made you like this because it's sci-fi, so maybe wait for the next thing. What's more important is when someone is like, "I love military stuff, and this is supposed to be that, but I hate it." Then that's a miss, and we screwed up. Help us understand why.
I went off on a tangent, but TLDR? Yes, it is a lot of pressure, and we release a lot of stuff. We're really tired. [Laughs]
Does the holiday season bring any sort of different challenge? I feel like a lot of people are either home on break or getting gift cards for skins, so there are probably a lot more eyes on the game.
Sean Marino: I wouldn't say so. We're not working during the holidays, which is a good thing because we don't have to worry about being on top of things during the holidays. It also means we need to button things up before we go on break. I actually had this experience two years ago, around Thanksgiving. I was traveling, so I didn't have access to the store, so I missed out on getting Wasteland. It is one of those things where maybe you're not in your regular space, so we also have to balance that out. How long do we keep something available? Do you let it go until January 3, or do you cut it off at December 31?
Preeti Khanolkar: We get two weeks where the company shuts down, and it's great. Cryostasis is going to be in the store for four weeks, and we have a bunch of other stuff that our team has also worked on. We have an Event Pass, we've got the Battle Pass, and we've got other stuff happening in the game. I hope players have a lot of stuff to keep them entertained, because we will also be playing during our break. But the devs definitely need their time off. It gets really crazy near the end, and we have everything in order so that we can go on break responsibly and feel like players still have stuff to do.
Sean Marino: It's our time to grind through the Battle Pass as well for some of us. I've done two of my weeklies this entire act, and I'm going to try and get through all of it in a week.
Preeti Khanolkar: But it's so funny that you mentioned gift cards. A bunch of folks on our team have kids, and all my kids ask me for gift cards so they can buy points and other games to buy stuff. Somebody shared a story with me recently where they were in a game, and there was a bunch of kids. The kids were like, "You have such great skins!" They're all showing each other their skins, and one of the kids asked another, "How much did you spend on skins?" and the other kid was like, "Three gift cards!"
Kids like that. That's so much more meaningful than $30 bucks. People are getting gift cards and spending them on our game, so you saying that was very special. Because you're right, that's gonna happen, and I hope people get a good Night Market, because this is the time to spend some money on skins and some gifts. I hope people like this skin and, if not, then I hope there's something in the rotating store and night market that appeals to them so they can spend their gift card on it.
Is there anything else you want players to know about this new skin or anything else coming up with Valorant?
Sean Marino: This skin bundle does have a new melee, and it's something that we're always conscious of. We have this balance of what types of melee weapons we like to release. There was a time where players were like, "No more swords. Please stop with the swords!" And we had a series of either karambits or butterfly knives, people were like, "Not again!"
I'm curious if this one actually hits well for players. It's something that we kind of played around with. We were like, "Here's an interesting opportunity. You have a hammer that you can make with the Crimson Beast, or you can have a massive hammer that you have with this one." Seeing if that's actually appealing for players is gonna be interesting.
Preeti Khanolkar: We rarely do this, because we generally have an idea of how far we're gonna go with something. But for this one, we actually decided to add a finisher and a kill banner much later. We were like, "We believe in this theme, and we want to see what it can do." It's a little bit different than our norm, and it's not a clear sci-fi or fantasy category or whatever. But we think that this might have its own appeal.
We showed the finisher off to a couple of influencers, and there was definitely a, "Holy sh-t, this is great," vibe. So we're cautiously optimistic. I think some folks will just not like it, because it's just not going to be their thing. But I hope that there is an audience that's like, "I've been looking for something like this, and this is exactly it." Maybe some people have been looking for an ice skin, and here it is. But whatever it is for you, I hope folks like it. And I hope the people that are like, "It's not for me," find something cool on the horizon coming up.
Check out each weapon available in the Cryostasis skin line:
Valorant's Cryostasis skin line will release December 14.