Fracture. What is there to say about Fracture that hasn’t been said already. It’s one of the newer maps in Valorant yet it’s also the one I’ve seen most frequently dodged. This map is known for how difficult it is to coordinate on and, unless you’re working with a team using comms effectively, it can be the most miserable map to play in the game. So Riot is trying to make Fracture that bit less controversial by polishing it up with a little love.
If you’re unfamiliar with Fracture, it’s the most unusually shaped map of all in Valorant. It’s got two attacking sides, with the defending spawn in the middle, which means that defenders have to be far more aggressive than other maps. If you’re loading into a game and Fracture comes up, there is quite a high likelihood that someone quits out, even more so than tropical map Breeze.
So the changes that Fracture will undergo are pretty significant. Let’s start with the changes to B. B site will have the ramp smoothed all the way up so there is no longer a jump to make the space easier to move in. Generator is having a small cubby at the back removed, again flattening the space. The biggest change here is that Arcade is becoming a lot thinner and having a large chunk of the entry area removed, making it a smaller hallway to run down.
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Then we have the defenders’ spawn which is again having a cubby removed, making it harder to hide on one side of the hall. As for A main the corner before entering site has been smoothed-out with a long diagonal wall and less junk making this place easier to be aggressive on. A site is having that box in heaven moved back into the corner so the site is easier to clear.
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The area around A Drop is seeing the most significant change, making it easier in theory for attackers to assault. So the drop is being moved backwards with a large cut out, and the boxers you’d hop onto to get up the drop are being replaced with a curb. A dish is also seeing a significant change with one of the two routes around the Dish being eliminated completely. And last but not least, A Rope is getting its own ledge to look into site from making that position a lot stronger.
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Riot has been fiddling with the design of its more recent maps in its latest patches. The newest map, Pearl, went under a rework not too long ago with some changes similar to what we see here in Fracture. I probably still won’t like Fracture as much as other maps, but at least this should make it more fun and the queue dodging less frequent.