A few things we noticed when we first saw Project A / @PlayVALORANT 's announcement a while [a thread]

Firstly - clear inspiration from TF2 art direction. No surprise here as the Art Director for "A" is also the Art Lead on TF2 - Moby Francke.

h/t @Slasher

The theme of contrasting red vs. blue was apparently in TF2 via maps.

You can see that also Valorant. Notice the very obvious color tones. In-game, you'll know exactly whose territory you're in, like TF2.

Warm/reddish tones vs. cold/blue tones

Furthermore, this color palette also helps with color-blindness and other aspects that making a game for potentially 100M+ people would matter.

Here's more blue vs red (prob the first thing most people notice)

Second biggest thing is the focus on silhouette - which most games do (like OW), but given that tactical shooters need more balanced and similar character shapes, this is something arguably a bit harder than OW/TF2 since you cant adjust the volume much.

Similar to TF2's iconic silhouette image, Valorant has one as well - basically the same style. And likewise the focus of the silhouette is on the upper torso to provide clarity to the parts that you care about the most + highlighting the weapon.

Moreover, TF2 focused on clarity the most on top of the silhouette. There were minimal detailing on the characters because the philosophy was "when the character is moving (basically all the time) the details don't matter"

You see this in the lack of small details in Valorant -

In TF2 - Characters are also designed to gradient-ed from dark to light from bottom up. You can see a little bit of that as well in Valorant, where the brightest part of the body is always at the top (mostly).

One of the last things that TF2 focused on was the actual color, since the game was concepted in grayscale, then color filled in later. A key part of this (like with characters), they made sure to NOT keep the saturation high, the values would always be around 50% saturation.

This explains why Valorant looks very "bland" to some at times - and not as vibrant as Overwatch, or even CSGO.

This is done for clarity, as in TF2, when you turned the scene into grayscale and posterized it (reduce as many tones as possible)- you would still get visual clarity of characters in foreground. Here it's done for the Valorant screenshots

^ Despite looking "bland" this is great for a very raw/tactical shooter, which is why it works for Tf2 and Valorant.

here are some examples from Overwatch and Fortnite where ultra-precise visuals wasn't as important as creating a vibrant world!

Of course this doesnt matter too much for OW + Fortnite, but it's cool to see. Here it is for TF2 - this is a bit hard to capture in screenshots, as its more so for in-motion characters, but this still should help convey the idea behind TF2's design.

Here is an hour long interview with Moby Francke where he discusses a few of these points. He also calls details "the noodly bits that people dont notice much" haha.