Riot Games provided Valorant fans with a shocking piece of info in the latest developer blog, which revealed that Ascent, the latest map in Valorant, took a staggering five years to develop and perfect. Valorant is the tactical, team-based shooter that Riot Games pushed out earlier this year to great success, immediately finding a place in the genre at the top beside other popular titles like Overwatch. In fact, Valorant has quickly become something of an esports darling, with many professional players from other games announcing their departure from those scenes to pursue a career in Valorant – a game that only came out of beta quite recently.
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It’s pretty easy to see why such talented players are willing to take a gamble on Valorant, though – it’s got a great combination of compelling and watchable gameplay, paired with the reliability and consistency of having a developer as huge as Riot Games steering its future. Riot, though still best known for the juggernaut that is MOBA League of Legends, has recently expanded its repertoire to include on the more popular autobattlers in Teamfight Tactics and a promising online card game based on League called Legends of Runeterra. Riot is also currently hard at work on a fighting game, too.
The freshest game, however, is still Valorant, a game that has been growing rapidly as more players become accustomed to the demands of its gameplay. In the most recent Riot Games developer blog, level design lead Chris Carney and senior game designer Salvator Garrozzo go over some of the elements that went into making Ascent, the newest entry into the Valorant map pool. The biggest revelation comes just at the end of the blog, where they acknowledge that the process usually takes up to a year – but in the case of Ascent, took a total of five. It isn’t because the map was a huge riddle to solve, though, but rather because it needed to keep adjusting to the demands of the game being built around it:
“Ascent took close to five years as it continued to evolve along with the game [Valorant] itself. It has been a long journey but in many ways we are just getting started.“
Another interesting fact about Valorant‘s Ascent map is that it was apparently one of the very first maps that was developed in Valorant, and was the site where many of the game’s core philosophies in gameplay and skill-building were tested and honed. For a map that’s new in the eyes of players, it’s surprising to learn just how much Ascent is built into the fabric of Valorant as a game. That could explain why the map has been a strong addition to the game early, though it’s still just as divisive among fans as any other competitive map being introduced to a multiplayer title’s map pool.
The newest developer blog from Riot Games illustrates just how much work goes into some of the more underappreciated elements of game design, like map-building. The fact that Valorant‘s Ascent map took five years to build in total, though, makes it one of the oldest maps in the game – despite, paradoxically, also being the newest one added now that Valorant has officially launched.
Valorant is available now on PC.
Source: Play Valorant
