Valorant developer Riot Games appears to have revealed that new Valorant agent Mage will be a Controller after all, following months of speculation.
The studio today released a brand new State of the Agents blog, within which senior character producer John ‘RiotMEMEMEMEME’ Goscicki shares a few new nuggets of information surrounding the upcoming Agent 21.
“We have seen that Controllers are in a bit of a drought,” RiotMEMEMEMEME notes, “and it feels like we have to go all the way back to ancient times to our last new Controller release with Astra.”
In our Valorant Mage release date guide, we postulated that the new agent would indeed be a Controller, due to the dearth of them within the competitive FPS game right now. And, in typical Riot style, the new agent is certainly going to have his niche.
“Aside from Viper, introducing Controllers that can cover large open areas is a blue ocean of opportunity”, the developer cryptically comments. Indeed, it’s pretty safe to infer that we will be seeing an agent that can excel on Valorant maps like Breeze.
This, poetically, makes sense considering the nautical language used throughout Mage’s section of the blog, and hints towards what we can expect from their abilities. It’s also a strong thematic link to the name of the person suspected to be Mage, Varun Batra, considering that the Hindu god of the oceans is Varuna.
Further credence is given to this theory when considering the sign-off for the post, “jald hi milte hain”, is Hindi for “see you soon” – at least according to Google Translate.
While all has yet to be confirmed, we can imagine it won’t be long before Riot drops the deets – possibly around the Valorant Champions 2022 finale, even.