Just hours before the highly anticipated Valorant Episode 10 Act 1 update went live, Riot Games released its first dev blog of 2025, offering fans a glimpse into what the upcoming season has in store for the game.
The update video teased a bunch of exciting features coming to Valorant over the next few months, including several crucial changes to the Competitive game mode alongside general gameplay improvements to enhance the overall player experience.
Valorant Dev Update 2025: Competitive Changes
The first Valorant dev blog of 2025 highlighted two major features that fans are eagerly looking forward to seeing in the game: Rank Shield and RR Rollbacks.
The former gives players an additional buffer of games before falling between major ranks while the latter provides RR (Rank Rating) compensation to players after they lose to a cheater in Competitive games.
Note that the Rank Shield feature applies only to major rank changes, not subdivisions. For instance, a player will be protected from deranking from Gold 1 to Silver 3 once, but it won’t prevent a drop from Silver 3 to Silver 2.
Remake Improvements
The Remake system of Valorant is also undergoing a slight overhaul heading into the next Episode. Moving forward, whenever a player abandons a match in the first round, a Remake vote will be automatically initiated. Furthermore, Remake votes will now require only a majority to pass, rather than unanimous approval.
Agent & Gameplay Changes
The devs have confirmed that they will focus on balancing some of the Agents in the first half of 2025. Players can expect changes to Iso, Deadlock, Harbor, and Neon within the next few Acts.
Changes to the map pools will also become much more frequent as the devs have confirmed that maps will be rotated with every Act to increase variety throughout the year. Each Act’s map pool will be announced shortly after the previous one starts.
Alongside the aforementioned changes, the devs also revealed upcoming tweaks to the Valorant esports ecosystem and provided an update on the replay system, which still remains a little ways down the road. Fans can watch the full dev update video to get a better understanding of everything new that the next Valorant season has in store for them.
