The heavily anticipated Valorant’s Episode 6 Act 1 is nearly here, and it’s all set to bring with it a plethora of new content to the shooter. These new additions include the Indian Map ‘Lotus’, changes to the competitive map pool, ranked improvements, new skin lines, and much more. Before the update goes live, Valorant will enter a period of downtime. During the time of the maintenance, players will not be able to log into Valorant or queue for any game modes. However, it’s only expected to last a few hours.
Let’s take a look at everything you need to know about Valorant Episode 6 Act 1 update, its contents, maintenance duration, and more.
The first and most notable change in this new Valorant patch is the addition of Lotus to the game. Lotus is the newest Valorant map and it’s also one of the only two maps in the game with three bombsites instead of the usual two. Featuring some never-before-seen and unique map mechanics like rotating doors and one-way slopes, it’ll be interesting to see how Lotus is received by the Valorant community.
Another important change in this new Episode is Split being reintroduced to the competitive map pool. Since the removal of Split in June 2022, Valorant fans have been repeatedly asking Riot to bring back Split into the map rotation. As part of the Episode 6 Act 1 update, the developers have reworked some portions of the map, and have reintroduced Split to the 7-map pool of Valorant.
Other than the map changes, Valorant 6.0 has removed one-way lineups for Omen. The Controller’s ‘Dark Cover’ ability will now automatically drop to the ground level after being deployed, which means players won’t be able to smoke into walls anymore.
“One-way smokes are a part of VALORANT, but they are difficult to play against and we want to keep them limited to intentional and understandable areas,” Riot Games said in a statement. “We’ll be keeping a close eye on how this impacts Omen’s power levels.”
Valorant Episode 6 Act 1 Maintenance End Time
Valorant servers are already down for NA servers and are expected to go back up today at around 2:00 PM UTC. The maintenance hasn’t kicked off for the other regions, but fans can expect Episode 6 Act 1 to go live around 00:00 UTC (January 11) for Asia and 6:00 UTC (January 11) for Europe.
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