Developer Riot Games has unveiled Valorant‘s new game mode. Called Replication, it follows the same rules as Unrated but with one major restriction: everyone on a team plays as the same agent. Replication goes live on May 11, which is when patch 2.09 is expected.
Players aren’t given an agent at random. Selecting an agent is a democratic process, with each team voting for which agent they want to play before Replication’s start. The agent with the most votes becomes the pick.
There are a few other modifications that come with Replication. Everything (except Ultimates) is refreshed every round and players receive a fixed number of credits. Additionally, players that are flashed twice within a four-second window will get a five-second protection against blindness called Flashguard.
When designing Replication, Riot said it wanted to offer more casual game modes. Game designer Kyle Powell reiterated this sentiment in a press release, adding that it’s all about widening the player’s imagination.
“With Replication, we are looking to create exciting and novel moments by widening the player theorycrafting space while highlighting Agent abilities,” Powell said. “Quintupling down on Agents that were balanced around normal Agent restrictions, we’ve created lots of hilarious near game-breaking plays for players to discover.”
Replication is not attached to an event, but it will “temporarily replace” Escalation. It’s expected to stay live for two weeks before moving to a “mode rotation strategy.” It’s unclear if Replication will remain a permanent fixture of Valorant’s multiplayer offerings going forward.
In other Valorant news, Riot Games announced plans to record in-game voice chat across all its games to combat toxic behavior. The first title under Riot’s catalog to embrace these new monitoring tools is Valorant.
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