VALORANT won’t have a way to support community-made maps any time soon, as the game’s development team will be focusing on delivering more content instead. In , game director Joe Ziegler spoke on what’s to come for VALORANT’s maps. While Ziegler agrees that community-made maps are valuable, the system needed to support 🅘theജm would take “years of development to get off the ground.”
Ziegler starts by explaining why the game’s newest map, Icebox, was released way earlier than expected. The team wanted to meet fans’ “legitimate demands for more gameplay variety outside of just new꧅ agents.” The development team believes adding more maps will be better for the game’s competitive map pool, giving players a “diverse range of strategic experiences and settings.”
The game now has five maps, though the devs still don’t think that’s enough. Ziegler confirms a couple more maps will need to be added🎉 before the team will feel confident aboutꦰ the game’s map diversity.
Ziegler next speaks on community-made maps and mods, as some fans have been asking for those to be available in-game. Ziegler says the team understands the “incredible value” of fan-made maps, but that creating a community sharing platform, along with map-making tools, would take “years of development to get off𒈔 the ground.” A project like this would also require a new team and additional time to maintain it in the long-term, Ziegler says.
“When we weighed that against other content we could make, with the team we already have,” Ziegler states, “the choice was pretty clear to focus on content.” Ziegler explains that the༺ VALORANT team is focusing all their resources on mak💧ing maps, as perfecting a map for competitive play is an extremely long and complicated process.
Ziegler states that, going forward, the game’s new maps will encourage you to “think about how you approach" the new environment. The team hopes to promote more diverse and ꦉstrategic gameplay by “challenging the basic conꦕcepts of map design” with future maps.
It is currently unclear when the next map will be added to VALORANT. The team originally planned to add a new map at t🧜he start of each Episode, though Icebox was meant to release alongside Episode II. Riot has not yet confirmed the next Episode’s start date, nor the content it will bring.
Source: