“I Think All the Top Players Are Gonna Love It”: Shroud on Latest Valorant Map Breeze and How it Could Affect Future Maps

Valorant has been one of the most balanced eSports FPS titles out there so far. This tactical FPS title from Riot Games has been successful in ensuring the player base gets what it wants from the game. Both in terms of weapons and agent abilities, Valorant has succeeded in maintaining a balance of power, not to mention the effective position Riot’s anti-cheat system has been playing in order to enforce competitive integrity. Riot has been pushing this game hard to build a competitive ecosystem for it, to the stature similar to that of League of Legends, the iconic MMORPG from the same company.

Speaking of balance and variety, the latest 2.08 update patch has added a new map in Valorant. Players have been eagerly waiting for it ever since the community got the wind of it. The new map, Breeze, has been getting a kind of mixed bag of reactions, although most of it is positive. It is kind of similar to how the community received the Icebox map. With both Icebox and Breeze, Riot has been trying to break out of the simplistic lane structure of the maps, to introduce a little more variety and tactical gameplay opportunity.

Recently, the iconic streamer Shroud shared his two cents about this map on one of his latest streams. From the looks of it, he is quite pleased with it.

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“… All the top players are gonna love it, and everyone else is going to hate it”: Shroud on the new Valorant map

Personally, he believes that it is the best map Riot has ever made for the game. However, it has been receiving somewhat of a backlash from many members of the community. As a result, Shroud is worried that Riot might not try anything like this again.

“I think this is the direction that they (Riot Games) need to go with their maps in the future. It just creates the synergy between all the characters and is huge. You don’t have just one smoke blocking the hallway and you’re good to go, you can take a sight.”

What he says makes a lot of sense. Breeze is one of the biggest maps in the game right now. Naturally, it opens up a lot of space for sniper-centered gameplay. However, as we said, the map is a shift from the usual lane-oriented layout of, say, Haven. As a result, this one will demand a great deal of teamwork and skill to survive. Now we know why he said:

“… All the top players are gonna love it, and everyone else is going to hate it”

The new maps are evidence of the change in gameplay that Riot is trying to enforce. Maps like Breeze and Icebox are significantly different than maps like Haven, or Split, which are reminiscent of the layouts of MMORPG maps. This new map needs a greater deal of skill to win over, with coordination being the order of the day.

We agree with Shroud’s views about Breeze. What do you think?