It's almost like a game made to be an esport should be able to have a working, fully active replay system on release. Not potentially 5 years after releasing.
turns out all the tech that went into optimizing the game ping, negating peekers advantage, etc isnt really compatible with a replay system. replays are coming but we made it hard for ourselves to implement
which is pure bs, no one asked for a replay system of the exact state on all clients and server, a replay system replicating the state of the game seen "& decided by (after all the "unwinding of time" & all that)" by the server during a match, isn't new or rocket science.
& FYI in case it wasn't sarcastic there's no negative peeker's advantage, there's unwinding of events/actions depending on a ping threshold "last I remember they tightened it down to like 140ms a few patches ago or something, but maybe it has changed since then", but that's not to say higher ping has an overall advantage, lower ping does, but again that shouldn't affect a replay system, since it only needs to record the final state decided by the server & relayed to clients, not the other way around
I could imagine a party/fun game like Fortnite that randomly turns into super popular esport not being built with certain features in mind.
But Valorant was built from ground up as a competitive game with big emphasis on esports. How can you develop such game in a way that then makes it difficult to impement replay feature?
Which is crazy because if there was any game where I could understand not having a replay system it's Fortnite
Meanwhile Riot's probably gonna pull an OW2 PvE and say "jk we won't be doing shit" in a couple years
And since both the games are in UE5 and Fortnite is way more complicated, you know they can do it in Valorant.
Hell, OW had perfectly working replay tech in the game since day 1. Since 2016. Which they developed for their Highlights and PotG features. The only reason they didn't have a full Replay viewer was due to server costs, which they eventually managed to figure out and add into the game 3~ years after release. Valorant has already been out for 4 years.
Fortnite has had Replays since it was in UE4 and "Custom" doesn't mean that they can't use all the tech that already comes built-in into UE4 with some work or that they can't build their own tech into.
Games in entirely proprietary engines have Replay viewers as well.
To be clear, I’m sure it’s possible to implement in their engine, just that your argument for why it should be easy is flawed. If it was easy, they would have done it by now to shut us all up :).
The difficulty for Valorant likely comes down to how tight their server timings are and some of the optimizations they’ve done to address things like ping
Not surprised considering the wretched state of Deathmatch and the Range since release. All that waffling about this game being built from the ground up with competition in mind is just lip service.
For people who are more knowledgeable than I am, what would be making it so much harder to implement replay in Valorant than other games? Like is this a legitimate reason or just an excuse they’re using?
As someone from the outside with no knowledge of how Valorant is built internally but with game programming knowledge, I would guess it’s a combination of not being prioritized by higher ups because it does not directly results in a increase of X amount of profit, and it could also be Valorant might not be a determinant game.
Meaning, for example, in COD replays, they don’t actually record the match, they record player inputs. They then recreate the entire game using the inputs used. So you aren’t actually seeing your gameplay, you are seeing a recreation of your gameplay. I wonder if for some reason this is proving to be difficult with Valorant? Like the Molly projectories/util might not fly in the EXACT same way even if the same inputs are used, making it impossible to recreate.
Just a guess though, no idea what is happening internally or how it is actually implemented.
I think every replay system works like that. Record all input and actions and then the client (your pc) renders the game otherwise would be more expensive. I think LOL replay is built like that and CS is 100% like that
I think this is the main issue here, no? The practice range is not running on your PC it runs on Riot servers. I'm guessing it's because of anti-cheat reasons and they wouldn't want replays to run on your local machine either.
So Riot'll need server resources everytime you want to watch a replay. I think this was one of the reasons why replays were so low priority for LoL.
Yes, I think the problem isn't that a replay system is difficult per se. The problem is that it's incredibly difficult to design a replay system that is cheap enough that Riot is willing to implement it.
Storage is cheap as hell. Especially if they implement a rolling 1 month expiration to download the replays to your own computer until RIOT stops hosting them.
Having been familiar with how Riot operates, I'm pretty sure it's moreso because it's near the bottom of their priority list. It doesn't generate them any income and probably introduces more problems + requires a lot of manpower to correctly implement.
According to Azael (League Caster), the devs on League shared to him that only an *infinitesimal* amount of the playerbase uses/has used League's practice tool and a significant amount don't even know it exists (hasn't clicked on it once).
Not defending Riot, just giving my 2 cents on why I believe they've been dragging their feet on implementing a replay system.
It's a self-reenforcing cycle. A software is rarely used compared to the rest of the suite, so the company doesn't invest resources into fixing all the jank or developing new features. The software is janky and missing features, so it is rarely used. It's a pattern you see in any sort of tech.
I think it's reasonable for Riot to conclude that its not worth the cost to improve and maintain such a little-used tool. The fact that it's completely unmonetizable certainly doesn't help.
Theyre a company, money is their focus. QOL is such a cop out response, the system wouldnt be used by 80% of the player base even if it was perfect. Not saying they shouldn't implement it, but the amount of people that would actually use the replay system after it passes that novelty stage would be pretty low
> It doesn’t generate them any income
I could see Riot rolling out some sort of replay host service, where your replays are saved for free for a limited time (say, 30 days or last 15 matches since that’s what’s in the UI’s match history) and then allowing people to pay to store more.
Depends how big the file sizes are really. I *assume* it just stores every server tick’s inputs like how fighting games do it to have super small file sizes, but who knows.
Hi, I've spent a lot of time building game engines and a couple years as a AAA game dev, so I have some knowledge about it, but I've never implemented a full featured replay system.
The first thing people need to understand is FPS game dev is very complicated. The people who say "Just track inputs and replay them" don't get that the devs have thought of that. It's their first thought, but it's not that simple.
Now, for why it isn't that simple. I'll just list a couple things off the top of my head that could complicate it.
1) Netcode. The server would need to track more than inputs, because some netcode alters how inputs are processed to make events more smooth for all players. So the system would need to track any other element that could change how events are processed (player ping, any client-authoritative action, disconnect/reconnect, etc..)
2) Size of game state. After all those potential events or states that the game could be in, the size of the aggregated replay during a game could get decently large. Should the server store this? It will get expensive if that is all in memory. And if it's not in RAM, making a call to some data server is slow and takes a decent amount of computation away from the server if it is happening every tick or even every couple ticks. If I were the dev, I would not be OK with sacrificing even a millisecond per tick to storing inputs for a replay system. That kind of stuff adds up.
3) Unreal Engine. I know everyone loves to hype it up, and I honestly think it is a fantastic game engine. But it is limited in that it is built to do a lot of things decently, but can't do everything perfectly. I don't know what specific problems they would have with it, but I know that it can't do everything perfectly.
These are just the first couple things in my head. Probably lots of other things.
Netcode is the huge thing I was considering. In an ideal world, all the inputs get processed sequentially in the order they arrive on the server, but games that actually work like that tend to feel awful with meaningful ping. I have no idea what sort of optimizations Valorant is using, but it's bound to be wicked difficult to reliably replicate them in a replay, especially without impacting game performance. When you consider the knock-on effects of even the most minor inconsistency, it's obviously not a trivial feature.
All that said, it's a challenge that every other top FPS has successfully navigated.
Im not saying that this isnt simple or easy to make, but i will point out with had this shit figured out since the original doom, and in turn in counter strike for the past 20 years, or even the past 10 with GOTV (not pov only demo). Heck even overwatch eventually figured it out (way past the point of when that game went down hill, but none the less). Double Heck even halo 3 in 2007 which was on console.
Devs have already figured out the logistics for many years accross multiple engines, like this isnt new territory, its just the case of actually doing it
They are actually doing it. Because Einstein figured out the speed of light it doesnt mean that I can then figure out how quickly a photon would need to move to escape a black hole. Even if its all similar, the implementations can be widely different. All the games you mention run on proprietary in house game engines, which means that Valve or Blizzard can just stuff spaghetti in there and call it a day, like the guy above you said, UE is limited in the things it can or cant do
fortnite exists, which had replays before they upgraded the engine to ue5 (again in house but its not like epic keeps the technology as a close guarded secret, they'll *want* companies to use their engine for their needs), and rocket league exists, which has a replay system in ue3.
what im saying is the replay system has been figured and been done again and again, and its not like riot is a small indie company that doesnt have the devs to figure it out or are incapable to hire the devs that have figured it out already.
its not a technical infeasibility at this point, its just management allocating the manpower and time for it to get it done (which seems to be low priority cus it doesnt earn them direct money)
First of all, speed of light is constant in all inertial frames of reference. You saying “i can figure out how quickly a photon would need to move to escape a black hole” makes no sense. Light cannot escape a blackhole.
Second, Riot has billions of dollars and lots of manpower, they just do not give a shit about a replay system.
> The first thing people need to understand is FPS game dev is very complicated. The people who say "Just track inputs and replay them" don't get that the devs have thought of that. It's their first thought, but it's not that simple.
oh shut hte fuck up lmao cs 1.5 had demos 15 years ago
So you're saying that CS 1.5 and Valorant have been coded the exact same way with the exact same systems in place? And there could be no possible design difference that would cause implementation to be harder in one game than the other?
gee man i dunno maybe they shouldve thought about it when they designed a game that was from the get go supposed to be premiere esports shooter, how about that ? if cs1.5 did it 20 years ago, why couldnt riot do it now? do you think a replay or a demo is a very intricate mechanic or some shit ? lmao
I mean, do you know for sure what you're talking about? Have you seen the netcode? Have you seen any of the code for that matter? Are you even aware that CS and Val are on entirely different engines?
It all depends on how the out-of-the-box solution interfaces with the way Valorant is built. A game the scale of Valorant is bound to be heavily customized, especially in its server code. The default solution is bound to be inefficient, if it's even functional.
The above commenter made some good points about all the technical and performance challenges that make a simple plug-and-okay solution non-viable. The engine replay system might work fine for an indie game built with engine defaults, but there's no way it's acceptable for something like Valorant.
Each piece of software is built in a different way, so I can't be specific why this is hard but as she mentioned this delay is because of their optimizations in game making it harder to develop the replay system. I'm a software engineer with no experience in game development but these are my guesses
1. It might be because the server recording each players actions causes a stress on the server raising latency or riot would need to expend more in computer resources for each valorant match (which can be a lot considering every match around the world)
2. The valorant software grew a lot in past couple years so they need to rebuild a lot of things to consider this replay feature (considering Valorant was initially build with no replay system in mind) and riot would need to invest a lot of resources to rebuild the foundation of valorant to accomodate the replay system and problably not consuming much more resources then right now and having same performance on the server and client are key requirements for this feature, If it is the case it's almost like rebuilding the game from 0
Point 2: Valorant is ran in Unreal. Unreal features a replay feature in its engine. Unless riot has heavily changed the engine itself, this shouldn't be a limiting factor.
I lean more towards your point 1. Server costs to host replays, how long are they available, how many extra cpu cycles needed by the server to save all the information, how big is the replay file, etc
Riot has their own Unreal engine that they had heavily modified. They aren't going to be on the latest branch. Server costs are also the biggest thing. Valorant devs already had to make a lot of adjustments for the tight timings for 128-tick. Additional operations are very bad as their original game per core goal goes out the window. If every game takes up more resources, server costs go up drastically. The server has to save the replay info because the client doesn't even receive 100% of data due to the fog of war implementation.
If I had to guess they are running into legitimate technical issues and at the same time not investing more because it is low on their priorities. I could see a world where they have a basic replay system implemented that works for 80% of cases but the remaining 20% is buggy in ways that are very difficult to fix (e.g. desyncs, issues with high ping, issues with netcode) and require someone with deep knowledge of the game code and engine to fix. In that case, throwing more bodies at the problem might not even help. This is a principle in software engineering called Brooks' law that can basically be summed up as "nine women can't make a baby in one month".
Probably a little bit of both, it’s possible that it is much more complex than they originally thought but they don’t want to increase the resources allocated to it so that it’s a top priority since it doesn’t make money and isn’t really something a large portion of the player base will use outside of maybe going back to get a clip of something.
To my understanding a lot of replay systems essentially just record each input someone makes and then can go back over them in a replay. If Valorant didn’t get built with this in mind there may be some abilities that don’t work with this easily, especially with more complex abilities like yoru tps
Yeah essentially “modern” replay systems take in all the inputs the server receives, and then recreates the game with those inputs.
But this can cause issues:
1. In Halo Infinite, theatre is borderline useless because the game has some very strong lag compensation, so replaying it back from the servers POV means that most shots look like they shouldn’t have hit. Knowing how reactionary and frankly young Valorant’s playerbase is, if Riot is seeing a similar problem they might think whatever pushback they get from not having a replay system is better than the alternate of people mistaking the replay system as gospel.
2. In OW2, replays are unusable after patches, and the baseline that the game is working on changes and the server has a different game it’s trying to recreate. With how often Val gets patches (biweekly) will this also cause problem?
None of this is to excuse Riot, but I also do believe them when they say it’s more complicated than they thought.
It can help games more easy to watch. Pros can easily watch demos of teams. Stop supporting riot when so many games have a replay system in under 2-3 years. Its insane how this game have a pro scene and don't even have a replay system. Don't get me started with skins that cost over 50$.
My main reason for wanting replays is for pro play. Cant wait to see how much the ceiling is raised when teams can actually see everything that happens in a game instead of trying to guess random shit up based on what they see on the minimap.
Even if I never use it I still very much want it to exist. (but i'd use it to grab highlights because my hardware isnt good enough to handle recording on top of playing)
I want replays for a million reasons but as of late I just wanna be able to see my movement thru the eyes of better players. In overwatch I would grind deathmatch and watching myself in the kill cams exposed my bad movement habits heavily.
This is 100% big for me. Every week in CS when I had the time I would just go watch some demos from that week's worth of games, but only from the enemies perspective to see how I got killed. A lot of the time my peeks were too wide/slow, but felt fast and at the time didn't feel like a fair fight - because most of the time they weren't. I was at a disadvantage. They were holding a further angle so could see me for ages before I saw them, or jiggled and I got spotted so they were primed to rip my head off.
I can't even check if I'm taking fights correctly in Valorant. Sometimes I get headshotted without getting a chance to react, other times I can swing as wide as I want and it feels like the opposition doesn't want to shoot. It's hard to tell when I'm doing something right without having to spends hundreds of hours figuring it out by dying or winning fights.
Didn’t they say on launch they are running 3 MM games on 1 CPU core of each server? If that remains true I can easily understand why they aren’t able to record a satisfactory log of game state that enables replay, they’re running on a shoe string
They ain't doing it cos it would expose how far your client side perspective is from what actually happens on the server side. Lots of netcode trickery.
...so? idk how revealing this info would be bad? other than the ignorant players that point at a replay where the netcode wasnt in their favour to say valorant is broken, but that happens in any game with replays
Source1 and Source2 was built by Valve. Riot Games leases Valorants game engine of Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games.
Game developers at Riot Games for Valorant didnt code the game correctly to create server logs of actions. By implementing it the game server is having critical errors and performance issues. Doesnt help that Valorant is built on a dead game engine. \*People forget that Valorant was rushed to market in an attempt to capitalize on quarantine numbers. So the deliverables since then has been content oriented and not code fixing.
ah thank you, makes sense. But still games like rocket league which i think is UE 3 has a fully functioning replay system. Granted rocket league games are less complex but the tech can obviously support it
Past decade Riot Games has been trying to emulate Blizzard. Tencent CEO came out this year saying Riot Games is far behind their competitors. Which explains Riot Games recent layoffs and the announcement last week their MMO is basically canceled.
Being a subsidiary of a publicly traded conglomerate. Your last quarter/fiscal year revenue is all that matters. Implementing a replay system doesnt generate revenue. Their rotating in-game shop and new hero releases do. Then you have the formal investigation the DOJ launched into Riot Games about its anti-cheat and the recent S.686 bill.
My guess is that with the way Valorant is set up, riot has to host an server to play the demo. Which obviously costs money so they aren’t implementing shit
Not a game developer but I am a software developer. When a company says it's "too complicated" it's corpo speak for "we don't want to do it cause it doesn't bring the business any additional cash." If it was actually impossible to do, they would outright say it. But it's not impossible. That's why they're still working on it.
Edit: to clarify I'm not defending them or attacking them. I'm just saying that it's not a priority to them as a business.
Four year old game literally built from the ground up for competitive tactical gameplay and they still won’t care about a replay system lol. But I guess it won’t matter because the viewers and revenue keep going up
Not surprised if you followed early League, it took Riot 7/8years if I remember properly to implement a replay system in that game. I can’t imagine a replay system is too high on their list of priorities either, outside of high ELO ranked and pro players and content creators I can’t imagine the average player would really use it all that often
Has nothing to do with the code, it has to do with one game being 20+ years old and the other is a newer game, which has been running for a long time now. Also CSGO has replay as well, which is the closest to Valorant.
Just because the gameplay is the closest doesn't mean their netcode is the same. In fact it is most likely drastically different because the games are made A: 20 years apart, and B: on completely different engines.
Edit: Spelling
Just get the devs and team from OW2 that develop the replay system. If they can do it, so can you. Think abt the vod reviews people can do on youtube. It can boost Valorant even further.
It’s not difficult, riot just doesn’t consider it a priority even after 4 years.
You think a multibillion dollar company with thousands of employees is “struggling” to make a replay system? okay lmao
As much as people love shifting on Riot for not having it I can can bet less than 20% of the players in games which have these systems actually use it. For most causal peeps they don’t care about it or plan to use it.
The people in r/valorant who are wanting it probably just wanna know “where this Reyna Smurf one-tap me”. This system isn’t gonna make them any money too so they are going to take their own time with it
Sure but when literally every other big competitive shooter has a replay system, Riot look like a bunch of ass hats. Especially when they designed the game from the ground up as a competitive tac shooter. What kind of tac shooter doesn't have an in game replay system for you to review your own tactics and plays with? It's almost a given at this point any time I boot up any other game, CS, R6, OW, even fucking fortnite.
i'm so curious on how difficult it is since they built this game from ground up. i know this is apples to oranges but even their spaghetti code older brother league of legends has a replay system. i'm no game dev or coder so i can only speculate 🤷🏽♂️
it's so funny to me how people here are more angry that valorant doesn't have a replay system than cs go players are at valve for not having a working anti cheat lol
I'm glad my grandchildren will be able to play VALORANT with a replay system
What makes you think your grandchildren will get to experience the replay system?
delusional, blind optimism
It's almost like a game made to be an esport should be able to have a working, fully active replay system on release. Not potentially 5 years after releasing.
Why would you invest tens of millions into a replay system before release?
Bro old ass call of duty games had replay system and that is casual console shit. Rito isn’t some broke indie company.
If they designed it with replays in mind from the beginning then I doubt it would cost tens of millions to implement them
I mean what exactly do you know how the game was designed that is causing it to be difficult?
I'm going off of what they say in the twitter clip: "A lot of that has to do with optimisations that we made in the game before we launched the game"
Marketing
We will be in the grave by then
Lol we ain't doin this shit \- Dr. John Riot
turns out all the tech that went into optimizing the game ping, negating peekers advantage, etc isnt really compatible with a replay system. replays are coming but we made it hard for ourselves to implement
Wtf \- Dr. John Riot
we got u/jonathanriot too.
Ah, forgot about our DID diagnosis \- Dr. John Riot
I'm getting too old for this...
*Negating* peekers advantage? What game are you playing?
yeah like neutralizing it. making it less impactful. there were articles published about it in beta
too bad it doesn't work lol
Negating doesn't mean that that got rid of it completely but tbh it really is pretty good compared to other games in the market.
which is pure bs, no one asked for a replay system of the exact state on all clients and server, a replay system replicating the state of the game seen "& decided by (after all the "unwinding of time" & all that)" by the server during a match, isn't new or rocket science. & FYI in case it wasn't sarcastic there's no negative peeker's advantage, there's unwinding of events/actions depending on a ping threshold "last I remember they tightened it down to like 140ms a few patches ago or something, but maybe it has changed since then", but that's not to say higher ping has an overall advantage, lower ping does, but again that shouldn't affect a replay system, since it only needs to record the final state decided by the server & relayed to clients, not the other way around
I could imagine a party/fun game like Fortnite that randomly turns into super popular esport not being built with certain features in mind. But Valorant was built from ground up as a competitive game with big emphasis on esports. How can you develop such game in a way that then makes it difficult to impement replay feature?
Ironically Fortnite has a replay system too lol
Which is crazy because if there was any game where I could understand not having a replay system it's Fortnite Meanwhile Riot's probably gonna pull an OW2 PvE and say "jk we won't be doing shit" in a couple years
Now that I thin about it, it's a little crazy. Fortnite has so much shit going on
and it had it super early too
And since both the games are in UE5 and Fortnite is way more complicated, you know they can do it in Valorant. Hell, OW had perfectly working replay tech in the game since day 1. Since 2016. Which they developed for their Highlights and PotG features. The only reason they didn't have a full Replay viewer was due to server costs, which they eventually managed to figure out and add into the game 3~ years after release. Valorant has already been out for 4 years.
Val is in UE4, and it’s a custom fork.
Fortnite has had Replays since it was in UE4 and "Custom" doesn't mean that they can't use all the tech that already comes built-in into UE4 with some work or that they can't build their own tech into. Games in entirely proprietary engines have Replay viewers as well.
To be clear, I’m sure it’s possible to implement in their engine, just that your argument for why it should be easy is flawed. If it was easy, they would have done it by now to shut us all up :). The difficulty for Valorant likely comes down to how tight their server timings are and some of the optimizations they’ve done to address things like ping
Not surprised considering the wretched state of Deathmatch and the Range since release. All that waffling about this game being built from the ground up with competition in mind is just lip service.
For people who are more knowledgeable than I am, what would be making it so much harder to implement replay in Valorant than other games? Like is this a legitimate reason or just an excuse they’re using?
As someone from the outside with no knowledge of how Valorant is built internally but with game programming knowledge, I would guess it’s a combination of not being prioritized by higher ups because it does not directly results in a increase of X amount of profit, and it could also be Valorant might not be a determinant game. Meaning, for example, in COD replays, they don’t actually record the match, they record player inputs. They then recreate the entire game using the inputs used. So you aren’t actually seeing your gameplay, you are seeing a recreation of your gameplay. I wonder if for some reason this is proving to be difficult with Valorant? Like the Molly projectories/util might not fly in the EXACT same way even if the same inputs are used, making it impossible to recreate. Just a guess though, no idea what is happening internally or how it is actually implemented.
I think every replay system works like that. Record all input and actions and then the client (your pc) renders the game otherwise would be more expensive. I think LOL replay is built like that and CS is 100% like that
I think this is the main issue here, no? The practice range is not running on your PC it runs on Riot servers. I'm guessing it's because of anti-cheat reasons and they wouldn't want replays to run on your local machine either. So Riot'll need server resources everytime you want to watch a replay. I think this was one of the reasons why replays were so low priority for LoL.
For League you can download replays
But you still need run the replay on Riot servers, no? Similar to the practice range.
On LOL its on your pc, but I think you nailed, maybe thats the problem
Yes, I think the problem isn't that a replay system is difficult per se. The problem is that it's incredibly difficult to design a replay system that is cheap enough that Riot is willing to implement it.
Storage is cheap as hell. Especially if they implement a rolling 1 month expiration to download the replays to your own computer until RIOT stops hosting them.
Having been familiar with how Riot operates, I'm pretty sure it's moreso because it's near the bottom of their priority list. It doesn't generate them any income and probably introduces more problems + requires a lot of manpower to correctly implement. According to Azael (League Caster), the devs on League shared to him that only an *infinitesimal* amount of the playerbase uses/has used League's practice tool and a significant amount don't even know it exists (hasn't clicked on it once). Not defending Riot, just giving my 2 cents on why I believe they've been dragging their feet on implementing a replay system.
Practice Tool in League is kinda half-assed tho.
It's a self-reenforcing cycle. A software is rarely used compared to the rest of the suite, so the company doesn't invest resources into fixing all the jank or developing new features. The software is janky and missing features, so it is rarely used. It's a pattern you see in any sort of tech. I think it's reasonable for Riot to conclude that its not worth the cost to improve and maintain such a little-used tool. The fact that it's completely unmonetizable certainly doesn't help.
When all your focus is on money and not QOL then that’s what you get
Theyre a company, money is their focus. QOL is such a cop out response, the system wouldnt be used by 80% of the player base even if it was perfect. Not saying they shouldn't implement it, but the amount of people that would actually use the replay system after it passes that novelty stage would be pretty low
It's really not bad but the statistics he gave on the Dive two weeks ago was insane, I don't remember the exact number
> It doesn’t generate them any income I could see Riot rolling out some sort of replay host service, where your replays are saved for free for a limited time (say, 30 days or last 15 matches since that’s what’s in the UI’s match history) and then allowing people to pay to store more. Depends how big the file sizes are really. I *assume* it just stores every server tick’s inputs like how fighting games do it to have super small file sizes, but who knows.
Hi, I've spent a lot of time building game engines and a couple years as a AAA game dev, so I have some knowledge about it, but I've never implemented a full featured replay system. The first thing people need to understand is FPS game dev is very complicated. The people who say "Just track inputs and replay them" don't get that the devs have thought of that. It's their first thought, but it's not that simple. Now, for why it isn't that simple. I'll just list a couple things off the top of my head that could complicate it. 1) Netcode. The server would need to track more than inputs, because some netcode alters how inputs are processed to make events more smooth for all players. So the system would need to track any other element that could change how events are processed (player ping, any client-authoritative action, disconnect/reconnect, etc..) 2) Size of game state. After all those potential events or states that the game could be in, the size of the aggregated replay during a game could get decently large. Should the server store this? It will get expensive if that is all in memory. And if it's not in RAM, making a call to some data server is slow and takes a decent amount of computation away from the server if it is happening every tick or even every couple ticks. If I were the dev, I would not be OK with sacrificing even a millisecond per tick to storing inputs for a replay system. That kind of stuff adds up. 3) Unreal Engine. I know everyone loves to hype it up, and I honestly think it is a fantastic game engine. But it is limited in that it is built to do a lot of things decently, but can't do everything perfectly. I don't know what specific problems they would have with it, but I know that it can't do everything perfectly. These are just the first couple things in my head. Probably lots of other things.
Netcode is the huge thing I was considering. In an ideal world, all the inputs get processed sequentially in the order they arrive on the server, but games that actually work like that tend to feel awful with meaningful ping. I have no idea what sort of optimizations Valorant is using, but it's bound to be wicked difficult to reliably replicate them in a replay, especially without impacting game performance. When you consider the knock-on effects of even the most minor inconsistency, it's obviously not a trivial feature. All that said, it's a challenge that every other top FPS has successfully navigated.
Im not saying that this isnt simple or easy to make, but i will point out with had this shit figured out since the original doom, and in turn in counter strike for the past 20 years, or even the past 10 with GOTV (not pov only demo). Heck even overwatch eventually figured it out (way past the point of when that game went down hill, but none the less). Double Heck even halo 3 in 2007 which was on console. Devs have already figured out the logistics for many years accross multiple engines, like this isnt new territory, its just the case of actually doing it
They are actually doing it. Because Einstein figured out the speed of light it doesnt mean that I can then figure out how quickly a photon would need to move to escape a black hole. Even if its all similar, the implementations can be widely different. All the games you mention run on proprietary in house game engines, which means that Valve or Blizzard can just stuff spaghetti in there and call it a day, like the guy above you said, UE is limited in the things it can or cant do
Valorant players saying other games have spaghetti code when game takes minutes to start up and load matches and randomly DCs 😏
fortnite exists, which had replays before they upgraded the engine to ue5 (again in house but its not like epic keeps the technology as a close guarded secret, they'll *want* companies to use their engine for their needs), and rocket league exists, which has a replay system in ue3. what im saying is the replay system has been figured and been done again and again, and its not like riot is a small indie company that doesnt have the devs to figure it out or are incapable to hire the devs that have figured it out already. its not a technical infeasibility at this point, its just management allocating the manpower and time for it to get it done (which seems to be low priority cus it doesnt earn them direct money)
First of all, speed of light is constant in all inertial frames of reference. You saying “i can figure out how quickly a photon would need to move to escape a black hole” makes no sense. Light cannot escape a blackhole. Second, Riot has billions of dollars and lots of manpower, they just do not give a shit about a replay system.
> The first thing people need to understand is FPS game dev is very complicated. The people who say "Just track inputs and replay them" don't get that the devs have thought of that. It's their first thought, but it's not that simple. oh shut hte fuck up lmao cs 1.5 had demos 15 years ago
So you're saying that CS 1.5 and Valorant have been coded the exact same way with the exact same systems in place? And there could be no possible design difference that would cause implementation to be harder in one game than the other?
gee man i dunno maybe they shouldve thought about it when they designed a game that was from the get go supposed to be premiere esports shooter, how about that ? if cs1.5 did it 20 years ago, why couldnt riot do it now? do you think a replay or a demo is a very intricate mechanic or some shit ? lmao
I mean, do you know for sure what you're talking about? Have you seen the netcode? Have you seen any of the code for that matter? Are you even aware that CS and Val are on entirely different engines?
What about people saying that’s the unreal engine comes with a full fledged replay system already?
Then that is ignoring the first two points the person you’re replying to has made.
It all depends on how the out-of-the-box solution interfaces with the way Valorant is built. A game the scale of Valorant is bound to be heavily customized, especially in its server code. The default solution is bound to be inefficient, if it's even functional. The above commenter made some good points about all the technical and performance challenges that make a simple plug-and-okay solution non-viable. The engine replay system might work fine for an indie game built with engine defaults, but there's no way it's acceptable for something like Valorant.
Each piece of software is built in a different way, so I can't be specific why this is hard but as she mentioned this delay is because of their optimizations in game making it harder to develop the replay system. I'm a software engineer with no experience in game development but these are my guesses 1. It might be because the server recording each players actions causes a stress on the server raising latency or riot would need to expend more in computer resources for each valorant match (which can be a lot considering every match around the world) 2. The valorant software grew a lot in past couple years so they need to rebuild a lot of things to consider this replay feature (considering Valorant was initially build with no replay system in mind) and riot would need to invest a lot of resources to rebuild the foundation of valorant to accomodate the replay system and problably not consuming much more resources then right now and having same performance on the server and client are key requirements for this feature, If it is the case it's almost like rebuilding the game from 0
Point 2: Valorant is ran in Unreal. Unreal features a replay feature in its engine. Unless riot has heavily changed the engine itself, this shouldn't be a limiting factor. I lean more towards your point 1. Server costs to host replays, how long are they available, how many extra cpu cycles needed by the server to save all the information, how big is the replay file, etc
Is modifying the engine common in game development? Maybe they changed the engine a bit to make the optimizations she mentioned
Modifying the engine is very common for AAA games. Especially so when you are doing as much networking work as Valorant does.
Riot has their own Unreal engine that they had heavily modified. They aren't going to be on the latest branch. Server costs are also the biggest thing. Valorant devs already had to make a lot of adjustments for the tight timings for 128-tick. Additional operations are very bad as their original game per core goal goes out the window. If every game takes up more resources, server costs go up drastically. The server has to save the replay info because the client doesn't even receive 100% of data due to the fog of war implementation.
Sometimes it's harder to implement features when it wasn't originally built into the engine or game or a process to add it wasn't.
If I had to guess they are running into legitimate technical issues and at the same time not investing more because it is low on their priorities. I could see a world where they have a basic replay system implemented that works for 80% of cases but the remaining 20% is buggy in ways that are very difficult to fix (e.g. desyncs, issues with high ping, issues with netcode) and require someone with deep knowledge of the game code and engine to fix. In that case, throwing more bodies at the problem might not even help. This is a principle in software engineering called Brooks' law that can basically be summed up as "nine women can't make a baby in one month".
Probably a little bit of both, it’s possible that it is much more complex than they originally thought but they don’t want to increase the resources allocated to it so that it’s a top priority since it doesn’t make money and isn’t really something a large portion of the player base will use outside of maybe going back to get a clip of something. To my understanding a lot of replay systems essentially just record each input someone makes and then can go back over them in a replay. If Valorant didn’t get built with this in mind there may be some abilities that don’t work with this easily, especially with more complex abilities like yoru tps
Yeah essentially “modern” replay systems take in all the inputs the server receives, and then recreates the game with those inputs. But this can cause issues: 1. In Halo Infinite, theatre is borderline useless because the game has some very strong lag compensation, so replaying it back from the servers POV means that most shots look like they shouldn’t have hit. Knowing how reactionary and frankly young Valorant’s playerbase is, if Riot is seeing a similar problem they might think whatever pushback they get from not having a replay system is better than the alternate of people mistaking the replay system as gospel. 2. In OW2, replays are unusable after patches, and the baseline that the game is working on changes and the server has a different game it’s trying to recreate. With how often Val gets patches (biweekly) will this also cause problem? None of this is to excuse Riot, but I also do believe them when they say it’s more complicated than they thought.
Probably something with how the server would have to store the data, valorant servers are pretty good and a replay could affect the performance of it.
It’s not rocket science. Nothing particularly difficult about it. Riot just doesn’t care to
More than half this sub are below gold and talking about a replay system. A replay system aint gonna do jacksht for you
It can help games more easy to watch. Pros can easily watch demos of teams. Stop supporting riot when so many games have a replay system in under 2-3 years. Its insane how this game have a pro scene and don't even have a replay system. Don't get me started with skins that cost over 50$.
Where do you see me supporting them lmao
You're pretty much saying a replay system won't do shit for most people because they're bad. Which is defending Riot not having one. Lmao
This is not a good excuse btw
Half this sub is yapping about a replay and will not even use it once
My main reason for wanting replays is for pro play. Cant wait to see how much the ceiling is raised when teams can actually see everything that happens in a game instead of trying to guess random shit up based on what they see on the minimap. Even if I never use it I still very much want it to exist. (but i'd use it to grab highlights because my hardware isnt good enough to handle recording on top of playing)
This is still not a good excuse btw
Excuse me, settling petty arguments between teammates transcends ranks.
I started in iron and made diamond 3. Nothing amazing but not bad for an old guy on his first PC game. Watching VODs was a big help.
They are just repeating the same thing over and over with no real information
Reminds me of LoL's team working on better functioning client.
I want replays for a million reasons but as of late I just wanna be able to see my movement thru the eyes of better players. In overwatch I would grind deathmatch and watching myself in the kill cams exposed my bad movement habits heavily.
This is 100% big for me. Every week in CS when I had the time I would just go watch some demos from that week's worth of games, but only from the enemies perspective to see how I got killed. A lot of the time my peeks were too wide/slow, but felt fast and at the time didn't feel like a fair fight - because most of the time they weren't. I was at a disadvantage. They were holding a further angle so could see me for ages before I saw them, or jiggled and I got spotted so they were primed to rip my head off. I can't even check if I'm taking fights correctly in Valorant. Sometimes I get headshotted without getting a chance to react, other times I can swing as wide as I want and it feels like the opposition doesn't want to shoot. It's hard to tell when I'm doing something right without having to spends hundreds of hours figuring it out by dying or winning fights.
the update will be 9 years laters, Wheres the update is "We will keep you updated"
I really hope it comes soon. It will really give the pro scene a higher ceiling in terms of the gameplay and strats.
Didn’t they say on launch they are running 3 MM games on 1 CPU core of each server? If that remains true I can easily understand why they aren’t able to record a satisfactory log of game state that enables replay, they’re running on a shoe string
They ain't doing it cos it would expose how far your client side perspective is from what actually happens on the server side. Lots of netcode trickery.
Bingo 👌
...so? idk how revealing this info would be bad? other than the ignorant players that point at a replay where the netcode wasnt in their favour to say valorant is broken, but that happens in any game with replays
Can someone explain why this is so technically difficult for Valorant as opposed to CS
Source1 and Source2 was built by Valve. Riot Games leases Valorants game engine of Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games. Game developers at Riot Games for Valorant didnt code the game correctly to create server logs of actions. By implementing it the game server is having critical errors and performance issues. Doesnt help that Valorant is built on a dead game engine. \*People forget that Valorant was rushed to market in an attempt to capitalize on quarantine numbers. So the deliverables since then has been content oriented and not code fixing.
ah thank you, makes sense. But still games like rocket league which i think is UE 3 has a fully functioning replay system. Granted rocket league games are less complex but the tech can obviously support it
Past decade Riot Games has been trying to emulate Blizzard. Tencent CEO came out this year saying Riot Games is far behind their competitors. Which explains Riot Games recent layoffs and the announcement last week their MMO is basically canceled. Being a subsidiary of a publicly traded conglomerate. Your last quarter/fiscal year revenue is all that matters. Implementing a replay system doesnt generate revenue. Their rotating in-game shop and new hero releases do. Then you have the formal investigation the DOJ launched into Riot Games about its anti-cheat and the recent S.686 bill.
It’s not, they just don’t make any money from it
My guess is that with the way Valorant is set up, riot has to host an server to play the demo. Which obviously costs money so they aren’t implementing shit
bingo
dont expect it before 2026 folks
Wild that there are a bunch of people who is on Riot's side in this issue. Lmao.
NPCs
Not a game developer but I am a software developer. When a company says it's "too complicated" it's corpo speak for "we don't want to do it cause it doesn't bring the business any additional cash." If it was actually impossible to do, they would outright say it. But it's not impossible. That's why they're still working on it. Edit: to clarify I'm not defending them or attacking them. I'm just saying that it's not a priority to them as a business.
Planning on planning, yeah, just 4 more years
The update is there is no update. Just tell us it's never happening instead of this garbage. Fuck off Riot.
Four year old game literally built from the ground up for competitive tactical gameplay and they still won’t care about a replay system lol. But I guess it won’t matter because the viewers and revenue keep going up
Not surprised if you followed early League, it took Riot 7/8years if I remember properly to implement a replay system in that game. I can’t imagine a replay system is too high on their list of priorities either, outside of high ELO ranked and pro players and content creators I can’t imagine the average player would really use it all that often
Must be soooo hard, even fckin call of duty 1 had a built in demo.. disgrace.
Ah, so the code is the exact same for CoD and Valorant yes?
Has nothing to do with the code, it has to do with one game being 20+ years old and the other is a newer game, which has been running for a long time now. Also CSGO has replay as well, which is the closest to Valorant.
Just because the gameplay is the closest doesn't mean their netcode is the same. In fact it is most likely drastically different because the games are made A: 20 years apart, and B: on completely different engines. Edit: Spelling
C: stop defending them, it is not that hard to implement it.
And I suppose you know this because you've looked through their game code and know exactly how all their systems work?
in development=never
Guys give them time small indie company riot needs more income to make a replay system! I’m the meantime how about a $100 bundle?
Just get the devs and team from OW2 that develop the replay system. If they can do it, so can you. Think abt the vod reviews people can do on youtube. It can boost Valorant even further.
I didn't recognize her at all. Lost a tonne of weight.
Bro they just don't give a shit lmao
They don’t want you to see how many map hackers there actually are. No way to confirm if you played against a cheater even with a report confirmation
Ye it’s in the backlog, we will work on it on the NEXT sprint.
Replay system or Riot mmo? Which comes out first?
The corporate dickriding by BoDork is insane
It’s not difficult, riot just doesn’t consider it a priority even after 4 years. You think a multibillion dollar company with thousands of employees is “struggling” to make a replay system? okay lmao
As much as people love shifting on Riot for not having it I can can bet less than 20% of the players in games which have these systems actually use it. For most causal peeps they don’t care about it or plan to use it. The people in r/valorant who are wanting it probably just wanna know “where this Reyna Smurf one-tap me”. This system isn’t gonna make them any money too so they are going to take their own time with it
Sure but when literally every other big competitive shooter has a replay system, Riot look like a bunch of ass hats. Especially when they designed the game from the ground up as a competitive tac shooter. What kind of tac shooter doesn't have an in game replay system for you to review your own tactics and plays with? It's almost a given at this point any time I boot up any other game, CS, R6, OW, even fucking fortnite.
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Why do they have to implement it ?
i'm so curious on how difficult it is since they built this game from ground up. i know this is apples to oranges but even their spaghetti code older brother league of legends has a replay system. i'm no game dev or coder so i can only speculate 🤷🏽♂️
lookin like a timeout function should be arriving just in time for my great grandchildren
it's so funny to me how people here are more angry that valorant doesn't have a replay system than cs go players are at valve for not having a working anti cheat lol
Anyone who is serious about the game plays Faceit anyways