It’s been six months since we had a map released in Valorant. The latest map, Fracture, was released with patch 3.05 in September 2021, with mixed reception from the casuals. Since then, there haven’t been any new maps. Three new agents, Chamber, Neon, and Fade, were added, but no new maps.
A new map, Codenamed: PITT, was leaked on Twitter by ValorLeaks a while ago. Also, Riot likes to sneak into what’s next in the Battlepass card. The battlepass card has an underwater trolley and is possibly an aquarium of some sort.
From the image released by Valorant on Twitter: it seems like an underwater town/city. The text on the picture is Portuguese, saying, “Celebrate our City, A marvel below the Waves.” At the same time, the image is titled Shrine Day.
Valorant official Twitter account captioned the image prepare to dive. Using all this, we can guess that the new map would be an underground city or shrine. The map is located near the coast of Portugal and likely on Earth two or Omega Earth.
Lore suggests that Chamber has already managed to meet himself from Earth two. Fade is from the Omega Earth, while Valorant initiative has been trying to create a portal to Omega Earth for a while. The release of a new map may suggest they can harness neon’s electricity for the portal Killjoy planned.
The map’s release won’t just be exciting for the game but would also add to the lore. For people who aren’t following it, they should. It’s intricate and intriguing for a game that is a tact shooter. Riot did put in a lot of effort for the lore.
From an E-sport’s perspective, The map would be the 8th addition to the map pool. Adding the 8th map will change the map veto process if Riot decides to keep all the maps in the active map pool. This wasn’t a problem with CSGO, as they always had only eight active duty maps for Competitive CSGO. We’d have to wait for the map’s release to see what Riot does to tackle the ‘MAP VETO’ issue.
If Riot decides to have eight active map pools, They will separate themselves from their Tact-FPS competitor CSGO. For now, we have to wait and watch how the scene and map pick change based on adding the new map.
Let’s prepare to dive on 22nd June, The day Episode V ACT I drops along with the new map ‘PITT.’
