After being leaked by Russian YouTubers, Riot Games finally revealed Valorant’s latest agent, Astra with a release date of March 2, 2021. Valorant’s fact sheet describes her as a Ghanaian agent that “harnesses the energies of the cosmos to reshape battlefields to her while” that possesses a host of skills to back this up. In the lead up to Astra’s launch, Riot Games revealed how this new agent came to be.
“With Astra we wanted to make a controller that was thinking about the whole map,” says Jordan Anton, Designer at Riot Games of how Astra fits into Valorant’s existing class paradigm. Controllers in the game slow down the opposition with their abilities and provide tactical advantages by slicing up the game’s map.
“Her global presence was there right from the beginning,” he says. “From there the fine tuning was in finding the right abilities to balance predicting enemies’ actions and reacting to changing game circumstances. We love that Astra has a literally different perspective on the map and from that top down view starts naturally thinking about all the different ways a round could go and how to account for them.”
That said, you can expect Astra to play a bit differently from other agents in the game.
“However, you can’t always be in the driver's seat dictating the flow of a round, so giving her some ability to react and change her plan was critical, though dangerous, as you leave your physical body vulnerable,” says Anton. “We wanted her skill expression to be about gathering information and turning that into a plan, where the execution phase is less about precisely targeting a grenade throw and more about seeing if your read on the enemy came together how you hoped.”
In addition to this, the company cites Afrofuturism as a massive source of inspiration in bringing Astra to life.
“African Futurism was a huge inspiration for us when it came to designing Astra’s thematics, once that element was brought into her development all the pieces naturally fell in place,” says John Goscicki, Producer at Riot Games. “Ascending above the map to place her ‘Stars’ is such a huge part of her kit, and there are amazing cohesive representations of African Futurism X Space that we were able to pull from. From there it was also about making sure there was enough of a real world grounded element to her personality and character design. To make sure those grounded elements were represented properly we worked with a consultant from Ghana on the details.”
This theme tied into Astra’s design as well. Particularly with her abilities such as gravity well that pulls players in an area before exploding.
“The space theme was a big inspiration for her game design, especially the gravity well,” says Anton. “We thought it would just be the perfect fit for a character who places and acts on stars. It was a fun chance to add something that felt like it wouldn’t make sense on anyone but Astra. The gameplay came together as a unique and versatile ability that gives her a different approach to situations than our other agents.”
Finally, the team at Riot shed light on the production process of bringing Astra into Valorant with Goscicki citing some challenges being “interesting”.
“Astra had some interesting ones at the end,” Goscicki says. “For a long time we were getting feedback in our DPT (Design Playtest) that she was not popping against the map good enough.”
What this meant was, players were unable to notice Astra on the map as intended, resulting those picking her having an unintended advantage. This forced Riot to revisit how the character was designed.
“This really confused us as we were applying all of the same read hierarchy tools that we used on the rest of the roster,” says Goscicki. “It turns out there was a material from something we scrapped on her, that was overriding her actual base materials, causing her to appear 2X darker at distances than intended.”
Astra will be playable in Valorant from this week and it will be interesting to see how the new agent impacts the game’s meta. Valorant itself has caught on in a large way in India what with Riot Games previously stating that it was “thrilled” with the way the game has been received in the nation.
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