Developers Riot Games has finally spilt the beans on the new Escalation Mode, which has also been given an official Valorant release date.
The good news is that Valorant’s Escalation Mode looks to live up the name, offering more casual and fast-paced gameplay, designed for social play.
It’s also a new mode that will help players to practise with new weapons in a way that frees them from the usual stat chasing meta.
In Escalation Mode, you start off with powerful guns, but in a twist that some might find challenging, the more kills you get, the harder it will get to handle your chosen weaponry.
You might also start to see it become less lethal, leaving the game wide open for the less-talented to score some eliminations.
Escalation will feature 5v5 team-based gameplay when it launches later this week, boasting semi-randomized guns & abilities, and an average match length of approximately eight minutes.
And the best part is that Valorant patch 2.03 will be bringing Escalation Mode to the PC platform very soon.
VALORANT PATCH NEWS AND 2.03 RELEASE DATE LATEST
According to Riot Games, the Valorant Escalation Mode release date has been set for Wednesday, February 17, 2021.
We don’t have a time for when the new Valorant update will be launched, but previous patches have been released early morning, Pacific Time.
So expect further news from Riot Games confirming when the next Valorant patch will be available to download.
Patch notes for the next Valorant update have not been released in their entirety, but Riot Games has shared a full description for the new Escalation Mode.
ESCALATION MODE – HOW IT WORKS
When the match starts, there is one randomly-generated set of 12 weapons/abilities which both teams must cycle through, roughly in order of ‘most lethal’ to ‘least lethal’.
A team must collectively get X number of kills/points in each of the 12 stages before they progress to the next one.
Upon progressing to the next stage, the player who got that latest kill to push the team over – automatically progresses to the next gun/ability in the cycle.
Members of the team who have already gotten a kill on a given level when it’s completed get a 5-second timer to press B (or their shop hotkey) to get the next weapon, after which they’ll get it automatically.
Members of the team who have not gotten a kill with that weapon will stay on the previous level until they get a kill, after which they’ll auto-upgrade to the next level.
If there is significant skill disparity, it is possible for “worse” players to be more than one stage behind. When they get their next kill, they progress to the next stage, not the latest team stage (i.e. they don’t skip any weapons).
If no team has won after 10 minutes, the team in the lead wins, and the match ends.
There is a 15-90s warmup in which players are given random weapons from the weapon set on spawn; it functions as a simple team deathmatch while waiting for players to load in.
Commenting on the goals for releasing escalation mode during Episode Two, Act Two, Kyle Leach, Engineer/Designer on Modes, had this to say:
“In designing Escalation, we wanted to create a quick, low-stress Team Deathmatch mode with high uptime that’s fun to play socially with friends. 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.”
