Riot Games’ VALORANT already has plenty going for it as a unique tactical shooter. With a cast of agents and their fancy abilities, tight gunplay, and unprecedented 128-tick servers, fans can now also look forward to novel experiences in each of VALORANT‘s maps.
Qwixzo and his team learned from an interview that four maps will be available on VALORANT‘s release. Each map has a unique caveat to its design that changes up the three-lane status quo of most maps in tactical shooters. They were only able to play two maps, however, named Bind and Haven, and went into further details as to how they were constructed.
For example, Bind lacks a mid lane but makes up for it with teleporters, while Haven has an even more important mid lane due to the presence of an extra bomb site.
Besides your usual bombs sites, there are other objectives lying around the map. There are blue orbs scattered around the maps, which can be captured and give all allies a charge to their ultimates.
Bind is the most traditional map with two bomb sites and lacks a mid lane, preventing teams from rotating quickly. There’s a faster and more dangerous way to travel, however.
Two teleporters exist on the map. There’s one near bombsite B, which allows players to skip a large chunk of the map to head to the other site and another smaller jump in the middle of the map that serves as a bridge from A to B. There’s no return ticket, so players might be left flat-footed should they commit to the teleport, especially the larger B-to-A one.
The teleporter also produces noise when used, giving enemies information even if they are no in visual range. Abilities can also be thrown through them, which can be an insane highlight or allow Agents like Sova, who has a pilotable Owl Drone, to gain massive intel in a short amount of time.
Haven is the polar opposite of Bind. It’s also the map where Riot has released most of its footage on, so we got a pretty good look at it.
Related: Here’s your first look at a round of VALORANT
Instead of lacking a mid lane, Haven even has an additional bomb site in the middle area, bringing the total of bomb sites to three.
With these maps, both attack and defense teams will have to think on their feet in order to come up with the best gameplan. Perhaps it’s time to burn the CS:GO playbook and start afresh with VALORANT‘s unusual map designs.
