Riot’s new tactical shooter, Valorant, has been officially released, and although Timothy “TimTheTatman” Betar stopped playing it a while ago in favor of returning to Warzone, he stated that he would return to the game when it launched. Tim had grown frustrated with the sheer number of the abilities in Valorant, as it started to clash with his Counter-Strike background and instincts.
During a recent Warzone stream, the 30-year-old explained how he plans to alleviate some of his frustrations while playing the game.
“I think my biggest issue is I need to not approach Valorant like it is Counter-Strike and I need to play it for what it is,” he said. “That sounds pretty basic, right but it’s true. I get really frustrated, cause in Counter-Strike, you have what, a flash and a smoke, right? But in Valorant, there’s like 17 smokes, four different flashes, teleports, and I have to play it like its own game. I can’t play it like CS where you just kinda hold an angle, you have one smoke, right, for like what, 30 seconds and then it goes away?”
It’s easy to compare Valorant to Counter-Strike. After all, Valorant seems to wear its Counter-Strike influence on its sleeve, as both games feature a low time-to-kill, a buy phase, and a round-based structure, just to name a few examples. As Tim suggested, however, a lot of the utility in Valorant does add a lot of chaos and variance to a game that wants to be taken seriously in the competitive scene. Add in damage-based abilities like Raze’s rocket, and it’s not hard to see why some Counter-Strike players would start to get frustrated.
Tim had said that he would be returning to Valorant on release day, but instead took the day off of streaming in observance of “BlackOutTuesday.”
Together we stand.
I will not be streaming today. Participating in #BlackOutTuesday pic.twitter.com/0PKrUeKWfg— timthetatman👑 (@timthetatman) June 2, 2020