As Iceland nears, on-air ‘Valorant’ talent prepares for an unprecedented event

This isn’t a hypothetical scenario for the live talent covering “Valorant” Masters this week. Roughly a year after its launch, “Valorant,” Riot Games’s tactical 5v5 first-person shooter, will see its first global competition in Reykjavik, Iceland. In a live broadcast, analysts and shoutcasters will be tasked with making what’s on screen comprehensible for a likely audience of hundreds of thousands. It’ll be no easy task: Every match is essentially a wild card. Most of the teams, which hail from every corner of the map, have never publicly competed against one another because of the pandemic. There’s little precedent for how a match might go.