Mastering the Art of Replaying in Valorant: Tips and Tricks
Curious about Valorant? Want to up your gameplay and dominate the competition?
In this article, we cover everything you need to know about Valorant, including how to play, enable, and use replays in the game.
We also explore the benefits of using replays, such as analyzing your gameplay, learning from mistakes, and improving your skills.
Additionally, we’ll share tips on how to enhance your gameplay, from practicing consistently to communicating effectively with your team. Let’s dive in and level up your Valorant experience!
Contents
Key Takeaways:
What Is Valorant?
Valorant is a tactical and fast-paced 5v5 multiplayer first-person shooter game made by the game development company Riot Games. Valorant, often stylized as VALORANT, is set on the various territories of planet Earth, featuring agents with a wide variety of distinct abilities in addition to just their guns. The game is G rated in all countries but still focuses on rewarding strategic play, precise shooting, and outwitting opponents during gameplay.
How to Play Valorant?
To play Valorant, download Riot Games’ desktop video game client, the Riot GAmes Launcher, at playvalorant.com. To play Valorant well, consider the following steps.
- After launching the client and signing in, download and install Valorant.
- Run the game and install any updates.
- Customize the video game settings on a machine to ensure a balance of high performance and high resolution. This is especially important as a Team Lead when overseeing general performance.
- Run the in-game training range. The Valorant training range is a sandbox environment that can be used by players to practice their aim, weapons, and agents.
- Join multiplayer rounds – Practicing in the training range is important, but the logic of the game only becomes apparent in multiplayer rounds.
What Is Replay in Valorant?
Replays in Valorant are visual-audio recordings of the user’s gameplay up to as much as 180 seconds prior to a kill or death. In the post-death screen they automatically play to verify that a player’s death is legitimate. Previously, a player’s lag or other problems may have caused issues in the Valorant anti-cheat system and/or allowed hackers to kill them. But they are not true replays or stored direct gameplay, as they only capture sound in 2021, and when used in the near future will require the entire scene to be rendered instead of having merely captured a proper record.
How to Enable Replay in Valorant?
To enable replays in Valorant, go to the game settings. In the data and rights tab, find your replay ID and share this ID with others inside the game to replay a past game together.
Step 1: Update Your Game
Updating your game is done in one of two ways. The former is the preference of most players as it happens automatically through the Riot Games client. The only time you need to manually update it is if you have set the Riot Games Client to not update Valorant automatically. In this case you are instructed to check for updates.
The process of manually updating Valorant involves clicking the small gear in the top right of the Valorant game window. Then click on Check for Updates and you should be presented with options to update both the game and Riot Games client. Click on Start Superclient upgrade if you see that option. If there are updates they will commence, if not Valorant is already up to date.
Step 2: Enable Replay in Settings
To enable the replay in Valorant, you need to go to the General tab in the Settings menu. It is advisable for most people to enable their replay. A player can enable two options related to replay in settings: Automatically download and save a replay of any competitive match and Save the last <(0-99)> competitive match replay files. Both of these options improve the characteristics of the Replay tool.
How to Use Replay in Valorant?
Replays are used in Valorant automatically by enabling RECORD TOURNAMENT GAMES. They are saved locally on a user’s hard drive in easy-to-view and share formats. You may also enable replays of a friend’s or previous game by typing replay in the bug report menu. Replays are viewed with a built-in viewing client or with video viewing software. To replay only specific rounds, use the SHIFT + F2 command and click REMATCH.
Step 1: Access Your Replay
To replay a game in Valorant, you must first access it in your Match History. Go to the Career and Stats tab under your profile in the main lobby and then search for your match in the Match History. Replays are only available for Competitive matches or the previous 20 games of the same type (Unrated, Spike Rush, Escalation). So, for a more recent match, Enter the Episode 3 leaderboards under Competitive and then View Career from there will display these recent games.
Step 2: Choose the Match You Want to Watch
After clicking on the Match tab, replays for the most recent VCT Challengers playoffs and Masters tournaments will display. In the top right, the timeline can be used to navigate to the month or tournament desired. Ahead of Selecting the purpose as VOD or you can explore specific data in other types of video data libraries. VALORANT’s default POV covers all agent POVs with cinematic views on switching from agents between rounds.
After opening a replay in Valorant, you will see the playback bar at the bottom with the ability to pause, change playback speed, skip ahead or back a few seconds, and go to the start or end of the video. While the video is playing, you can click and drag the player’s camera to change their viewpoint and move to a different part of the map. You can also drag the camera position on the minimap to move quickly to different areas of the map.
What Are the Benefits of Using Replay in Valorant?
- You can watch pro players on Twitch, on their desktop monitor on the big screen, but what you see is them playing live matches in real-time.
- Recorded can provide detailed analysis and game replays.
- Replay lets you review a match from a third-party perspective as you play the game.
- Whereas after-action replay allows you to see your gameplay against an opponent from their POV.
- It enables you to see clear kill placements detailed enough that shots can be examined against individual frames of motion.
- It will allow you to study and learn how you were killed, how you whiffed shots, how your utility use was suboptimal, and how your call-outs did or didn’t help your team kill probabilities.
- You learn how you might have cheated your opponent out of a kill and when your opponents made poor decision mistakes. Benefits of such feedback include not only individual player development but also training team tactics, scouting opponents, and discovering unintended exploits.
- Riot also uses data analytics (not speculated to include psychological evaluations) to assess how effectively the game is functioning as intended and how to tweak future game development and balance.
- Some, but not all, games described as developing competitive e-sport metagame of strategies and tactics, like Company of Heroes, will benefit from vod review with data analytics to develop better strategies and tactics, particularly for the team.
Analyze Your Gameplay
Replaying your game in Valorant is an excellent way to analyze your gameplay and improve your future performance. Pros often use replays to learn from their mistakes and up-and-coming players would benefit from adopting the same practice.
If you want to know how to replay in Valorant, the first step of the process is to analyze your gameplay. Look at every kill you secured and death you suffered. Was it because of your aim? Were you in a bad position? Did you push your luck too far? Did you fail to check a common angle or clear a space properly? In the moments you have to make decisions and be aggressive, did you make the right decision?
These are some of the questions you can ask yourself during the replay of a game. For every kill secured and death suffered, you may find ten other smaller mistakes. What does it matter that you did not use the utility of your agent before you peeked? As the DAZN’s Zejir% says, the small things can matter the most in a valorant match. Replay yourself and find them.
Learn from Your Mistakes
Unless you are watching Valorant replays to get an idea of who your teammates and/or enemies are and how they behave, there is really no benefit to watching your opposing players’ points of view, especially for newer players. Instead, pause and rewind often to see how different strategies and agent abilities work.
One hidden benefit to watching replays is that you are able to see how agents’ abilities field-of-vision cones look to others. For example, in the EU Open Q3, the Viper mains dropped poison in select corners which noticeably increased pick percentages.
Remember that the bottom right of the radar gives you certain information about players no matter which agent they are. This includes who they are, how much health and shield they have, and to an extent, which direction they are moving. Training yourself to keep glancing at the minimap will make awareness a lot easier both for finding your positioning relative to your team and flanking opportunities or rotates from the opposition.
Improve Your Skills
One of the main purposes of replaying in Valorant is to improve your skills. By using advanced features such as player heatmap and damage heatmap, players can understand where they are strongest and weakest and improve their game in those spots. Additionally, players can engage with services such as Gametree to replay matches together with other players and get feedback and improve from the feedback of others.
Users can share publicly available highlights (plays and clips of their matches) with the rest of the Valorant and YouTube communities. Spectators can review replays, download key instances from the matches, and upload these moments to YouTube.
Viewers rate and opinionate others’ highlights and VODs. Two viewing channels exist: one for simple player highlights and one for post-edited video called Collaborative YouTube Replays (CYRs). Replays posted to this service should at least start at the moment of action in any event so time viewers do not need to scrub around randomly to find highlights. The drag-and-highlight functionality of Raven’s media player makes this process even easier.
You expand the Share Highlights with Others point to get other audience perspectives and opinions. In Raven//Spectator, users have the ability to fork off to a different YT video that shows that moment of action from another point of view. This is especially useful in determining cheating.
How to Improve Your Gameplay in Valorant?
There are many ways to improve your gameplay in Valorant including increasing your aiming and movement skills, becoming a mental leader, and managing in-game resources properly. These strategies include the following:
- Go prone and fire: This increases your accuracy over prolonged exchange duels in the game due to increased shooting stability and elimination of your weapon’s random recoil during multiple continuous shots.
- Practice flick shooting: This will increase your shooting accuracy especially when you need quick target accuracy in order to secure a frag or clutch the game.
- Intentionally avoid shooting enemies: This gives you better positional control and is especially useful when your team is determined to avoid the enemy.
- Exploit high ground: Seize higher vantage points on the map which give you superior vision control and positioning to your enemies usually located on the lower ground.
- Consider your character’s abilities: Remember to always include your character’s abilities in your strategy.
- Fundamentals of the game: Work on improving your game planting and defusing as well as regularly utilising the ‘sotrones’.
Practice Consistently
It is important to practice map knowledge, crosshair placement, agent knowledge, peeking, ability use, map control, positioning, map control, and aim consistently. Regular practice will solidify these habits and hopefully improve your playing ability against opponents. Play the game consistently as 3 games per day for 4 days per week is better practice than playing 12 games per day for one day and then not playing for a couple of weeks afterwards.
Watch Professional Players
Watching professional players play competitive matches in Valorant is another way of improving your performance. It provides players with an opportunity to study movement patterns, angles, gunplay progression, and equipment usage strategies of some of the top players. Watching how the best in the world use their agents can help give players insights into how they can better leverage their own agent’s abilities.
Analyze Your Own Gameplay
Replaying your Valorant game is one of the best ways to learn from both your own mistakes and the tactics your opponents are working against you. This information gets lost in the ether if you don’t go back and look at your games in replay mode. You can identify where the momentum in a game shifts by looking at your own play and by extension, the strategies your opponents are employing against you.
Communicate Effectively with Your Team
Communication is one of the key aspects of Valorant gameplay, primarily for announcing enemy locations. Especially when a team was slaughtered, a player might need to be replayed in order to make the call that lets the team know there is only one attacker left, and a coordinated push can be organized to ensure success using everyone’s resources. If the replays are out of reach, then the player may be forced to go towards the enemy, potentially ruining any chances of getting a plant by revealing their position to the enemy team.
Here are some ways to communicate effectively to replay in Valorant:
- Use a microphone for Voice Chat
- Use a keyboard for Text Chat
- Use the automatic in-game messages that can be brought up by pressing Z or Y in Valorant. These include enemy sighted, enemy at entrance melee and others
- Ping using your Crosshair. There are a number of different pings that can be used and navigating to an AoE related facility.
- Use Map Navigation. While an A or B call can sometimes help, indicating the exact spot where the enemy is encountered or planting the bomb is ideal.
The same methods listed above to communicate effectively to replay in Valorant can and should be utilized to explain or expand on guidance after the match concludes. Players can give feedback to the replayed team members to ensure they know why they should have done something differently.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to Replay in Valorant?
Can I replay my matches in Valorant?
Yes, you can replay your matches in Valorant by using the built-in replay system.
How to Replay in Valorant?
How do I access the replay system in Valorant?
To access the replay system in Valorant, go to the main menu and click on the “Replay” option.
How to Replay in Valorant?
Can I save my replays in Valorant?
Yes, you can save your replays in Valorant by clicking on the “Save Replay” button in the replay system.
How to Replay in Valorant?
Can I watch my friends’ replays in Valorant?
Yes, you can watch your friends’ replays in Valorant by accessing the “Spectate” option in the replay system and selecting their name.
How to Replay in Valorant?
Is there a limit to how many replays I can save in Valorant?
No, there is no limit to how many replays you can save in Valorant. However, older replays may be automatically deleted as new ones are saved.
How to Replay in Valorant?
Can I fast forward or rewind during a replay in Valorant?
Yes, you can fast forward or rewind during a replay in Valorant by using the arrow keys on your keyboard or the timeline slider in the replay system.
