The Riot Client is bugging out and updating, so you know what that means! It’s a new update for Valorant, introducing new skins, new battle pass, and new agent Waylay is dashing into the scene and on site to-! Oh, she’s dead.
With Version 25 Act II, the second major update in season 25 of Valorant, Riot Games released Thai agent Waylay, the 28th agent introduced to the Valorant Protocol, on Mar. 5th. Voiced by Mo Rodvanich, an LA based actress from Bangkok, and designed by design lead, June “Riot Junebird” Cuervo, Waylay sparked excitement amongst the “Valorant” player base as time ticked towards her official reveal during Masters Bangkok on Mar. 2nd. But on the day of official release, reactions were mixed.
As expected, the season started with people wasting ten bucks to unlock, instalock, and rock your ranked games, because where’s a better place to try out a new character than in competitive queue where your mistakes become everyone else’s problems? But that’s not necessarily the fault of the character; everyone’s just too trigger happy and want to play with the new toy on the shelf.
However, in terms of visuals, I have issues. Corporate wants you to find the differences between the splashart and in-game model, and there’s so many it wouldn’t fit into this article. Mind you, there will always be a disparity between the advertising art and the reality of the game, but the whiplash I felt at finally seeing her sent me six feet under and buried under my disappointment.
Her art shows her with an interesting white-gray-black gradient for hair while wearing a yellow jacket and baggy pants, something a TikTok hip hop dancer could wear, with a multitude of colors showing a silhouette of her to showcase her abilities and theme. But once the game starts, you’re hit with the ugly duckling of the family lined up next to the other much more brightly colored characters in the game. The irony of a light-inspired character, being dull. Point and laugh. But let’s start at the beginning.
One of my bigger peeves is her name: Waylay. According to Cambridge Dictionary, the word ‘waylay’ is defined as ‘to wait for and then stop someone, especially either to attack or talk to that person’. Now personally, that feels almost too generic for a character with such an obvious theme. Would it be cheesy to call her something like Refract or Glare? Yeah, but we have a fire based resurrecting agent named after a mythological bird, so it’s not entirely out of the ballpark. And practically every other character has a call sign related to their theme or playstyle, with the one exception being Clove, but you don’t hear anyone tripping up and getting tongue-tied over that name do you? It’s a communication-heavy game, I don’t need to know Sally sold seashells by the seashore. You can’t even shorten her name either, like the community did to Killjoy into KJ, because saying ‘WL’ is arguably longer than ‘Waylay’. While this is more of a nitpick, her name still bothered me enough to warrant a whole paragraph to it.
Another sore point for me is Waylay’s hair. It looks like someone grabbed her by the ankle and started dipping her in a pot of bleach before deciding against it, but also forgot to fix the damage and instead left her with a harsh contrast between stark white hair and ink-dipped tips. And while the hairstyle certainly makes her unique – which is a positive, since it reduces redundancy in the character pool – I think it was poorly executed.
And then there’s the shoes, which is an incredibly odd thing to get irritated about, but I’ve never recoiled more aggressively. She’s wearing what I can only assume are clogs, but they look more like slippers a middle-aged mother would threaten you with, all with a voice to match the age of one. Combined with the happy-go-lucky attitude and occasional swear you’d expect out of a twenty year old, her image doesn’t fit together with her personality.
And finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: her gameplay. While she has a lot of potential in a team composition, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with her abilities on the surface, nothing about her feels right either. The new Hinder effect is interesting, and the casual Phoenix ult on a basic ability is hilarious, but everything else is lacking. For someone who “transforms into light itself” and “darts across the battlefield” – official descriptions of Waylay from Riot Games – I’ve never felt slower.
Her dashes are awkward, slow, and lacks the fluidity of someone that’s supposed to travel like light. She’s also supposed to “strike down her targets through shards of light”, but where are the shards? She has holograms and visages at best, and the only “shards” are the fragments of dull sickly yellow etched into her skin. While number changes – like animation cooldown or equip time – are easy and very likely to happen, there were so many missed shots with Waylay’s abilities that it would have made an Iron player look Radiant.
\TLDR – too long don’t read – Waylay just doesn’t make any sense. She doesn’t feel like a cohesive and well thought out character. Her name insinuates disruption, her theme suggests speed, her voice and attitude don’t match, and her abilities are a blatant mashup of different characters. Riot could have taken their time to create a more smoothed out agent, since it barely feels like a day has passed since Tejo was released – an opinion shared by most of the community. But Riot’s creative streak seems to have finally run out of steam as they started forcing puzzle pieces and scraps of ideas together with duct tape and prayers.
