Valorant's next character is KAY/O, a killer robot who suppresses enemies
Also he's got some regular grenades
There's a lot in Valorant that feels like Counter-Strike, but Counter-Strike could never do trailers where they introduce new robot killing machines. That's what Valorant's latest character is. Called KAY/O, his main ability is to suppress his enemy's abilities. He'll join the game alongside the beginning of Episode 3 on June 22nd, and the trailer is below.
KAY/O's basic ability is a supression blade. Throw this at a wall and it suppresses the use of abilities by anyone within its blast radius. He also has a flashbang, a frag grenade, and an ultimate "overload" ability. The latter causes his suppression ability to be emitted in waves from his location, preventing enemies within range from using their powers for a short while.
I quite like that Valorant's pitch is basically "Counter-Strike with magic abilities", or often "magic abilities that roughly approximate Counter-Strike items", but here the magic is just... a flashbang. This isn't a complaint - I quite liked Valorant up until the point where random players started yelling at me during matches.
In some notes sent along by Riot, character producer John Goscicki wrote that these abilities "should be bread and butter gameplay for many of you that have been lobbing nades your whole lives." Game designer Ryan Cousart, meanwhile, added that, "The throwing knife is a really fun story and I pretty much just thought it would be badass if you could throw a knife into a wall." Fair play, honestly.
Valorant recently got a new mode that lets you pit teams of the same agent against one another. If everyone picks KAY/O and uses their suppression ability to suppress everyone else, is everyone suppressed or no one?