Riot chose to develop
Valorant using
Unreal Engine 4, which the development team said would allow it to focus on gameplay and optimizations rather than spending time on core systems.
[27][28] To meet the goal of a lower performance barrier so more people could play Valorant, the team set notably low minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the game. To reach 30 frames per second on these small requirements, the game's engineering team, led by Marcus Reid, who previously worked on Gears of War 4, had to make several modifications to the engine. These modifications included editing the renderer using the engine's mobile rendering path as base, or reworking the game's lighting systems to fit the static lighting that tactical shooters often require, as to not interfere with gameplay.
[27] Unreal's modern underpinnings also helped to solve many of the issues that Riot set out to solve from other games in the genre, and additional modifications helped to meet the game's other goal of creating a suitable competitive environment, including optimizing server performance by disabling character animations in non-combat situations and removing unnecessary evaluations in the hit registration process.
[29][25][27] During development, Riot Games made promises to work towards a
ping of less than 35 milliseconds for at least 70% of the game's players.
[30] To accomplish this, Riot promised 128-tick servers in or near most major cities in the world, as well as working with
internet service providers to set up
dedicated connections to those servers.
[30] Due to the increase in internet traffic during the
COVID-19 pandemic, Riot has had trouble optimizing connections and ping to their promised levels.
[31]