Ah yes, let’s just throw turrets into every competitive multiplayer game. There’s no way something that can auto-lock onto targets and rack up damage from a distance can be frustrating, right? I died from various Torbjorn turrets in my time with Overwatch, to know that their implementation in games can be tricky to say the least. Yet with a game like Valorant, which focuses on low time-to-kill and solo lives during rounds, I have to imagine that Riot has been very careful in balancing their latest agent, Killjoy, who was unofficially but sort of officially revealed last night.
I’m going to take a guess here and say some overly-tired Riot staffer hit publish on Killjoy’s blog post just a little too early because that’s exactly how he was revealed to the world. The post on Valorant’s official blog was only active briefly but it was long enough that sharp-eyed players grabbed the information they needed. There were even videos showing off Killjoy’s abilities, including an Alarmbot, Turret, Nanoswarm and Lockdown which were dug up by dataminer floxay and shared to Twitter.
The first two are pretty self-explanatory but to delve into the more creatively named abilities, Nanoswarm is Killjoy’s “E” ability and causes him to, “Throw the grenade. When it lands, it goes quiet. Then, activate the Nanoswarm to deploy a damaging swarm of nanobots and catch the enemy crying”. I also think it looks a lot like Glados when she gets turned into a potato in Portal 2 (spoilers, I guess?). His Ultimate ability, Lockdown, is a device which detains all enemies within its radius for 8 seconds after it warms up, which seems super powerful in a game like Valorant. Enemies can destroy the device so players will have to get creative with placements.
If anything, the addition of more direct damage dealing abilities shows that Riot is clearly comfortable diverging from Counter Strike’s formula more than it already has. It’s unclear when Killjoy will become available for players but given that the current battle pass is ending on 4 August, it seems like a pretty straightforward plan to drop him when the next season, or “Act” as Riot calls them, of Valorant kicks off.
Last Updated: July 29, 2020
