At this point, even Riot Games agrees that the knife combat in VALORANT has a huge issue with properly detecting hitboxes.
In the current build of the game, knives don’t accurately represent the proper feeling of hitting your opponents in a heated battle. On top of that, an unintuitive hitbox paired with confusing visuals has made the whole weapon more of a meme in the current meta.
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Knifing your opponent is never part of the actual meta in a tactical shooter like VALORANT. However, when the opportunity arrives and you find yourself behind an unsuspecting enemy, you would want to use your knife to get that extra style point over your opponents.
Due to some inaccuracies with the hit detection system especially with knives, knifing your opponent in the back sometimes backfires in a pretty significant way. Consequently, players usually stay away from using knives in any scenario to avoid embarrassment.
Riot finally addresses the issue with knives
Following the introduction of the new ‘Escalation‘ game mode, the overall problem with the knife hitboxes became more apparent. In a recent VALORANT blog, devs finally responded to the complaints related to knives.
“Our knife is a bit of a meme right now. It’s serving the purpose of either psychological-driven kills on unaware opponents or a last resort when out of ammo—but it’s rarely a decent (or reliable) choice to use in any other situation“, Nicholas Smith, Weapons Designer and Kyle Leach, Modes Designer & Engineer.
Riot agrees that knives are not in a stable condition right now. Since knives are not a critical part of the combat meta in VALORANT, they decided to postpone a possible fix. Although they did mention that in the future they will take a second look at knives.
“The hitbox is static, unintuitive, and only active for a very brief period of time. This leads to frustration and confusion when combined with visuals that imply the knife does damage during the entire slash motion. These are things we’d like to improve, but other weapon balance issues generally take priority over this work because the knife isn’t intended to be a critical part of our combat model“, Nicholas Smith, Weapons Designer, and Kyle Leach, Modes Designer & Engineer also added.
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Riot acknowledged the hitbox issues with knives but due to other elements that require more urgency from the dev team, they decided to fix them at a later date.
