If you thought weapons and abilities weren’t enough, Riot Games has come up with a fresh gimmick for you to exploit on the newest VALORANT map, Abyss.
As its name suggests, Abyss is VALORANT’s first map with no external boundaries, so you can strike your enemies off its steep edges to deal lethal fall damage. As fun as that sounds, players can accidentally fall prey to those death drops, so prepare to be on your toes all the time.
If that description intrigues you, as it should, here’s when Abyss is coming to VALORANT.
Abyss release date: When is the new VALORANT map coming out?
As announced by Riot, Abyss is slated for release with VALORANT’s Patch 8.11 on June 11. That said, you won’t get to play it in your ranked or unrated games straightaway.
When Patch 8.11 launches and Abyss goes live, the newest map will be available in Unrated, Swift Play, Spike Rush, Escalation, and a week-long Abyss-only queue where players can queue for the new map by itself in Unrated matches.
For fans of competitive, Abyss will enter the active/Competitive map pool with Patch 9.0. Until Abyss joins the active pool, Competitive players will have six maps to choose from. Finally, Abyss enters the map pool for Premier mode in Patch 9.02.
Aside from just Abyss’ launch, Patch 8.11 is set to bring a major refresh to the active map pool. The update will welcome the highly missed Haven map back, so it’s time to shine, agents. Unlike the new map, however, Haven will return to the Competitive rotation on June 11—it won’t have an exclusive mode as it’s an old map returning to the game with no changes. At the same time, Breeze and Split will be rotated out to accommodate Abyss and Haven in the map pool.
Non-ranked modes like Unrated, Swift Play, Spike Rush, and Escalation will now use an unrestricted map pool, which includes all maps like Abyss, Pearl, and Fracture.
Besides map pool changes, Patch 8.11 also refreshes VALORANT’s duelist meta with major reworks focused on multiple agents, including Reyna, Iso, Neon, and Raze. As a pseudo-duelist controller, Clove gets a nerf, too, which we think was unnecessary.
