Valorant devs explains why hated maps are never going away

Valorant product manager Coleman Palm explained to fans that the team has no plans to remove a map from the game permanently.

Riot Games released a Valorant developer update on May 21, explaining upcoming game changes, including map rotation and the replay system.

After learning that Breeze and Split would be removed from the map pool and replaced by Haven and another new map, players began to question the shelf-life of maps. Palm addressed the idea of permanently removing maps in a Reddit thread discussing the revealed changes.

“Would you ever consider permanently taking a map out of the pool? With the amount of maps increasing it becomes a more viable option,” asked one Redditor.

“I think if a map got to the point where we wanted to take it out of the pool permanently, we’d probably just rather rework it and get it to a point where we’d want to put it back into the pool instead,” replied Palm.

Despite new maps entering the fold, Riot seems to have no plans to eliminate one Valorant map forever – even if some players want to see the likes of Icebox or Breeze get the boot from the map pool.

Reworking maps is the main focus behind removing them from the pool. As Palm explained in his answer, the team wants to work towards making the map better rather than discarding it.

“It’s hard to say, ‘rework’ isn’t a formal term we really use internally or have clearly defined, so we’re in pure speculation territory here. I’d say we’ve shipped pretty meaningful updates to a few maps (Fracture, Split, Breeze immediately come to mind) but I’m not sure I’d say we fully reworked a map before. But, once again, these aren’t really formalized terms we’ve aligned around,” he explained.

Haven will be making its way back into the fold with unknown tweaks and changes, while Split and Breeze will be getting yet another round of updates. However, the fate of Pearl and Fracture remains unknown as they are still out of the map rotation for the foreseeable future.