Valorant Episode VII Reflections: All you need to Know

Valorant recently celebrated its third anniversary. And since the first day, Riot has done its very best to keep the game fresh by introducing agents, maps and modes, balancing weapons and more. The game is constantly changing. While the game is popular, the scrutinizers are much more than other titles. Amongst other notable criticisms was the lack of a game mode to practice the agent's abilities and the inability to access the previous battle pass items. Riot, with the upcoming patch 7.0, wishes to address this with the introduction of a new game mode and a complete overhaul of the progressions system. Let's look at these changes.

Progression Overhaul and Agent recruitment changes:

The new progression and agent recruitment changes can be roughly divided into three parts: new Dailies, Kingdom credits, Agent recruitment and gear. Let's tackle these one at a time, starting with Kingdom credits.

Credits: Riot Games

Kingdom Credits:

Riot will announce Kingdom Credits with Episode VII. Contrary to Valorant points and radianites, players cannot buy Kingdom Credits. Paraphrasing Riot itself, "Kingdom Credits are meant to reward the time you've invested in playing VALORANT." You'd get the Kingdom Credits by completing dailies (the new daily missions).

These credits can unlock agents and agent gear(which we discuss later) and buy previous battlepass accessories. The kingdom credits can also buy skins from the last three battlepasses.Players can access the accessory store under a seperate tab in the "Store" menu. Riot would randomize the accessory store similar to the regular storeTo kick off, Riot would award 5000 Kingdom Credits to everyone. The Kingdom credits are capped at 10000, so spend them often.

Dailies:

Credits: Riot Games

The dailies of Valorant are getting a complete overhaul. Instead of completing daily missions,  for playing any Valorant mode except Deathmatch. These dailies will feature milestones called checkpoints. There will be four checkpoints for each day, and each checkpoint will need four charges. A player must acquire 16 daily charges to complete the day's dailies. The charge awarded would depend on the mode a player plays.

Team Deathmatch, Spike Rush and Escalation award two charges, while Swift Play, Unrated, Competitive and Premier award a charge per round won. Completing these milestones will count towards Battlepass, Event pass and Agent pass. Completing all four milestones will award bonus XP and Kingdom Credits.

In case players miss a day, the game will convert the previous day's checkpoints into a 2x bonus and apply it on the current day's checkpoints.The weekly missions are still in play, and every time a player plays, it would account for the weekly missions, dailies and Account XP.

Agent Recruitment, Agent Gear and Agent Pass:

Credits: Riot Games

Agent Pass will replace the current system to unlock an agent called Agent Contract. An event pass will accompany the release of the new agent. Players can unlock the agent by completing the agent recruitment event pass. The duration of the event pass is 28 days and completing the pass  Playing the game during the duration will account for unlocking the agent. The amount of time required to unlock the agent compared to the previous contract method will be the same, but the agent pass will also reward players with Kingdom credits which can be used later.

Players can find the gear associated with the agent like the player card, player weapon etc under the "Agents" section. Players can still unlock the agent using VP. Additionally, if you miss the agent pass or have old agents, you can unlock them using the Agent Unlock tokens awarded to the new players. Players can use the agent contract to unlock the gear and earn extra Kingdom Credits.

New game mode:

Along with the aforementioned changes, a new game mode will hit Valorant. The New Team Deathmatch will feature a 5v5 ability race to 100 points. We will discuss more about the game mode in separate articles. But a TL: DR;  Players can use the new mode to practice agent abilities.

All these updates go live with Patch 7.0 along with the release of episode VII. Follow Strafe for more updates on this.

Credits: Riot Games