On June 27th, Riot’s hero shooter Valorant will get a team deathmatch mode. Teams of five will be able to do battle without the need to buy weapons at the start of each round, Counter-Strike-style, as they do in the main game. There will also be three new maps to play on.
Here’s a trailer, which has a brief bit of backstory but then mostly introduces how the new mode works:
Team deathmatch games are split into four timed stages, with pistols available in the first stage and each subsequent stage offering a different selection of more powerful weapons. These weapons can be picked up from spawn points around each of the three new levels. Killed players can respawn after 1.5 seconds and the first team to 100 kills wins.
Valorant is a lot like Counter-Strike, if the CTs and Ts had magic wizard powers as well as grenades and submachine guns. I liked it a lot at launch. I also like when modern shooters make it like its 1999 again, and make guns float and rotate in the corner of a level for folks to pick up.
The three maps you can play team deathmatch on are new, but each is made using familiar textures and architectural styles from other existing Valorant maps. The new maps are called Piazza, District and Kasbah, and you can watch videos of all three – and get more details on exactly how TDM works – over on the Valorant site. Team deathmatch is arriving on June 27th alongside Valorant’s Patch 7.0.