‘Harbor is warm, positive and confident’: Riot Games’ senior game producer on Valorant’s first Indian agent

John Goscicki, Senior Game Producer, Riot Games, called Valorant “unapologetically global” and the representation of a controller agent of Indian descent is to offer a global experience to its millions of players. “For Harbor, we were looking for a personality and a character that’s like, warmer, more positive and confident and ready to get into a fight,” Goscicki told indianexpress.com over a video call from Santa Monica, Los Angeles.

“We watched tons of movies from Bollywood and different film industries within India, read books, talked to a bunch of writers to try and get the inspiration behind the new agent,” said Goscicki, who is also a senior character producer on Valorant.

“When you load up the game, and you see the swath of characters, you see someone who can represent your culture and your lived experiences in some way. We wanted to expand that into India and the wealth of human experiences, culture, food, and entertainment,” he added

Goscicki said he and his team made sure that Harbor should be represented as authentic as possible in the game.

“A huge focus of ours has been to make sure we are remaining as sensitive as we can to our players, but also showing them in the light that they would ideally like to be portrayed,” added Alasdair Gray, Head of Marketing – APAC, Riot Games.

Riot Games’ Valorant is a free-to-play team-based tactical shooter with a five-on-five setup. Each match has 25 total rounds; the first team to win 13 rounds wins the match. Each character called “Agents” has special abilities, so winning depends on a combination of precise shooting and using powers, and of course teamwork.

The US-headquartered game developer Riot Games is owned by Chinese gaming behemoth Tencent. First debuted in 2020, Valorant is Riot’s first game with a whole new IP that is different from the League of Legends universe.

Goscicki said the work on the character development of Harbor began 13 months ago and that’s when his team started researching and gathering references like from which part of India Harbor belongs, what’s his age, and the language he speaks to make the character part of the gameplay and narrative.

Harbor will be part of Riot’s Valiant, a hugely popular 5v5 tactical shooter game. (Image credit: Riot Games)

“We always thought of an aspirational agent within the game for Valorant, a character that can represent what it means to be like a human in the day-to-day,” Goscicki said when asked about how to describe Harbor.

While Goscicki declined to reveal more about Harbor’s personality and storyline, he did mention that the new agent will be outside of the inworld controller space, someone who is more approachable.

“The idea with Harbor from another angle was how do we provide those tools in a different way to players to address these long angles. We’ve seen him [Harbor] really shine on maps like breeze, and icebox in our internal playtests. So, I’m super interested to see how players are utilising him in that sense because really taking over large portions of space was one of the primary goals for him.”