Line-ups are one of the coolest aspects of high-level VALORANT, both at the top tiers of ranked and at the game’s highest esports level. Whether it be with Sova’s Shock Dart, KAY/O’s grenade, or Viper’s Snakebite, players will spend tons of time and energy finding impressive line-ups, and they’re commonly found as the focal points of VALORANT content online.
But it turns out the effort that goes into finding these line-up spots is not replicated by the game’s map designers when it comes to designing line-ups. In fact, the developers aren’t thinking about line-ups at all when they make new maps.
In a lengthy blog post detailing how VALORANT‘s latest map Lotus was created, lead level designer Joe Lansford revealed the team isn’t planning or even thinking about line-ups when they make a map, saying that “sometimes in game development things also happen by accident.”
“I’m definitely not a lineup person,” Lansford said. “I play Brimstone and Breach, and for me there’s no such thing as a lineup. We measure areas for crosshair height, we look at corridor width for smokes and mollies, and we pay a lot of attention to how important angles play. But in terms of specific util lineups, we don’t really build anything like that intentionally. We just let the art kind of be the guide.”
Related: Best VALORANT agents to play on Lotus
A big aesthetic focus of Lotus was its Indian-inspired rock-cut architecture, which features lots of structures built and cut into the rockface itself. Inadvertently, the team’s dedication to authenticity has led to a handful of different discoverable line-up spots.
At first glance, the developers’ comments about line-ups could sound disparaging. But if you consider that the team making the maps aren’t thinking about line-ups at all, it makes the seeking and discovery of viable line-ups even more impressive.
