Meet KAY/O, as the practice bots have finally come to exact their revenge!
Taking lore to a new level
With this new addition on top of the lore cinematic released on May 30th, “Duality”, VALORANT has seemingly, increased the focus on their lore, with the new trailer bringing much more to the table than simply revealing the new agent. With the aim to “Seek all Radiants” and to “Suppress their powers”, KAY/O has finally been revealed as an initiator. With the aim to increase the focus on gun-play with his kit, KAY/O brings a molly, a suppressing throwing knife, a flash, and an ultimate that allows being revived by a teammate, cementing his role as the initiator in his comp. Most of these abilities were previously visited after being leaked with precision.
The main theme in the trailer shows KAY/O learning from his mistakes, after analysing what happens to predict the upcoming situation, and works towards completing his mission, neutralising the Radiants. And it shows him completing an analysis of Cypher, after dying with his abilities, creating this bridge between KAY/O’s story, and his in-game role to neutralise abilities.
In a seemingly post-apocalyptic conflict, we see KAY/O taking a last stand against a seemingly triumphant Reina, and with “The Planet in Ruin”, we see that the scale of this conflict has gone out of hand. The attention to detail in this scene is interesting where you can see in a scene after this depiction of the past “version” of KAY/O, or perhaps a predecessor of his, cause a reaction in a current version, where you can see in the trailer that the current battling KAY/O starts giving “Danger” signals. All in all, adding further emphasis on the learning behaviour of these bots.
This theme of adaptation and learning is a very interesting take on AI learning, taking this idea and embedding it into the technologically advanced, world of Valorant. Riot is definitely releasing their agents in an order that keeps the story progressing. There is some speculation about the correlation of KAY/O, being part of this project to “deal with” radiants, or perhaps, just the ones that are threatening. As this very interesting thread on Twitter speculates.
The conflicts begin to climax as the lore slowly, but surely is being unveiled, and we now finally have a solid understanding of what Reyna mentions in-game when she mentions “Enough with the robots, I want their maker” – referring to an enemy Killjoy on the enemy team. With all this information on our plates, there’s a lot to dig into, and the direction Riot is taking with the lore is certainly one to look forward to, as the in-game Meta is not the only thing that will be seeing drastic shifts with this new addition. Seems like the practice bots have been the ones practising on us!
