Valorant closed beta announced by Riot Games, set to begin on April 7

You’ll have a chance to try out Riot’s new shooter ahead of launch.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

What you need to know

Recently, Riot Games, developer and publisher of League of Legends, began announcing a wave of new games. One of these is the arena shooter Valorant, a first-person shooter where different agents have special abilities and the focus is on tight gunplay. Today, Riot announced a closed beta for Valorant, which is expected to begin on April 7 in Europe and North America.

To sign up for the closed beta, you’ll need aRiot account. You’ll then need to link your Riot account to aTwitch account. Finally, watch for Valorant streams onTwitch. Right now, the closed beta sign-ups are limited to people in Europe, Canada, United States, Turkey, Russia and Commonwealth of Independent States. More regions will become available as servers continue to be set up.

Valorant is planned as a free-to-play game with skins that can be purchased using Valorant Points, in a very similar vein as League of Legends. Any points players purchase in the closed beta will be refunded with an additional 20%. So if you purcahse 5000 points in the beta, you’ll get 6000 points when the full game launches. Your progress will not carry over from the beta to launch and Riot notes that the amount of points needed for skins and the price of Valorant Points is not final.

For more information on Valorant, you can check out a recent Reddit AMA withone of the game designers here.

Get the Windows Central Newsletter

All the latest news, reviews, and guides for Windows and Xbox diehards.

Samuel Tolbert is a freelance writer covering gaming news, previews, reviews, interviews and different aspects of the gaming industry, specifically focusing on Xbox and PC gaming on Windows Central. You can find him on Twitter@SamuelTolbert.