Alongside the Act 3 Battlepass, Riot is adding a brand-new map to Valorant on October 13; Icebox. Originally meant to launch in Episode 3, Riot listened to fan feedback and decided to bring the release forward and add Icebox to Valorant way ahead of schedule.
Riot says;
Your next battleground is a secret Kingdom excavation site overtaken by the arctic. The two plant sites protected by snow and metal require some horizontal finesse. Take advantage of the ziplines and they’ll never see you coming.
Icebox has a focus on verticality too, which is something new for Valorant.
Valorant New Map Icebox
Devon Fay, Maps Art Lead describes the inspiration for Icebox as “films with a sense of isolation.” These movies include The Thing and Aliens. Fay says, “Our creative challenge with that was to try and show an isolated location that was more than meets the eye, but was also not so depressing that players wouldn’t want to spend many hours competing on the map.”
Salvatore “Volcano” Garozzo, Level Design Lead says the goal for designing Icebox was to “emphasise skirmishes” and “adaptive play.” Icebox features two Bomb Sites which are designed to be combat hubs. It also includes a zip-line to quickly traverse the map horizontally.
Game Director Joe Ziegler said Icebox is launching three full months ahead of schedule, which comes down to player and fan feedback. “Feedback has been pretty clear,” he said, “players feel like they need more maps. We did some investigation to see if we could push things up and we think we can.” With Icebox joining Valorant on October 13, the pool of maps is increased to five.
Dexter Yu, Senior Producer on Valorant explained bringing Icebox forward in greater detail.
Players spoke, we listened. We are always listening to feedback from our players and strive to surprise and delight where we can. We take community requests seriously and do everything in our power to provide our players with the best experience possible. Therefore, we prioritized early testing of our new content with players vs. additional polish.
We recently found opportunities to make shifts in our production plans to make this possible for Icebox. By releasing Icebox in a beta state on Oct 13th, we allow players to join us in our efforts to make this map competition ready. Speaking of: under current Riot tournament rulesets — once a new map spends 4 weeks in ranked mode, it is eligible for tournament play — if Icebox fares well in its beta phase, it will be eligible for inclusion in the later stages of our first official Riot-produced tournament, First Strike.
Icebox will be available for Valorant on October 13.
