Ever since the launch of Valorant in 2020, it has undoubtedly sparked the best-ever rivalry between itself and Valve’s Counter Strike: Global Offensive. With a plethora of CSGO professionals having already made their switch to Valorant, the scene of Counter Strike in every region across the globe has definitely seemed to recede.
All of the above does sound absurd but change is the only constant, they say. Counter Strike players often complain about Valorant not being friendly enough to take on any site and is a copy of Overwatch which heavily banks on your skill set. This was indeed addressed by Joshua “steel” Nissan from T1 who stated that some Valorant players haven’t been able to differentiate the game from CS:GO.
The year 2020 saw as many CSGO pros who called quits on their CS careers in a bid to compete at Riot’s brand new first-person shooter alongside their fellow teammates, some of them eventually from their previous rosters followed by the rest i.e. the young aces. If we go on to name them, the list might come out to be a big one but it won’t hurt to mention some, Oscar “mixwell” Cañellas, Spencer “Hiko” Martin, and Braxton “Swag” Pierce. These three were among the potential prospects in CSGO who always tried to scale the pinnacle of the scene but the allure of revitalizing their careers made them inculcate a change within their careers.
In a most recent interview with Duncan “Thorin” Shields and Geo “Geometric” Collins, Steel did state some facts where Valorant players who transitioned from Counter Strike are yet to differentiate the game from Riot’s first-person tactical shooter.
A lot of CS players couldn’t figure out that it’s a new game and you can’t play it exactly the same. We’re now getting to the point where everyone that’s been playing Valorant since beta is probably going to have a leg up on players who want to transition now from CS.
The major takeaway from the interview was the constantly shifting meta in Valorant as compared to in Counter Strike. In the latter, we saw the AUG meta which lasted only till the IEM Katowice 2019 but was later patched up by the developers in a bid to balance out the irregularities.
