New Casual Game Mode “Escalation” Coming to VALORANT Tomorrow
VALORANT players who are tired of Spike Rush and Deathmatch are in luck. A new mode is going live tomorrow.
Riot revealed the introduction of Escalation, a casual game mode involving teams of five players. In this mode, as players collect kills, their weapons get replaced with worse ones. This exciting new mode will be available starting Wednesday, February 17.
According to Kyle Leach, a designer on modes, “We’re hoping to provide players with an opportunity to practice gunplay across the entire arsenal and experience some abilities in novel ways, while providing a shared objective that benefits from some coordination but doesn’t require it for a team to succeed.”
Escalation pays homage to casual Gun Game modes from popular games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty. In this mode, players will have semi-randomized guns and abilities that they cycle through. At the beginning of the match, teams will receive a randomly-generated set of 12 weapons and abilities, progressing from the most lethal to the least. Players will cycle through each of the 12 stages by accumulating kills and points.
The player who gets the final kill to push their team over the threshold automatically progresses to the next gun/ability cycle. Teammates who have gotten a kill can press their shop hotkey to move to the next cycle. Those who haven’t gotten a kill will remain on the previous level until they do, except for the final stage.
If a victor hasn’t been decided after 10 minutes, the team in the lead automatically wins. However, the average match time is expected to be around eight minutes.
During playtesting, Leach described a hilarious match involving “10 Boom Bots rushing” him. This turned the mode into a “horror game” as he tried to “fight off a horde of Boom Bots with an Operator.” Fans can expect other signature abilities from VALORANT’s agent pool to appear in Escalation mode.
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