Riot need to face the truth on Fracture

I, just like Riot, thought Fracture was a super cool idea for a map.

The Defenders spawn in the middle, the Attackers can come from anywhere – really cool idea. In theory.

In practice, it’s awful. Map control as Defenders isn’t all that useful, because all it does is let you flank – but the whole map is designed around flanking, so it’s obvious. You can’t do a powerful, unseen flank because, well, everyone is ready for it.

It’s time to give up the ghost.

Split was bad, but…

I haven’t seen a single person who genuinely likes the map.

It suffers from the problem that most VALORANT maps have; it was designed with all of the plays you could make in mind. It was made for you to do every single peek you can do, it’s so sterile.

But Fracture makes it worse.

It’s very claustrophobic, and yet incredibly chaotic. You always feel funneled through chokepoints as an Attacker, and as a Defender you always feel like you’re flanking through those chokepoints.

It’s a miserable experience.

The lack of a proper mid means that slower plays where you take control and strangle Defenders don’t really exist. You pick a site and you have to execute. It removes so much of what makes tactical shooters ‘tactical’.

It’s all incredibly boring. You play the map once, and you’ve done everything you can do on it.

We all know that Split isn’t a great map; if you were going to remove one of the early maps, it’d have to be that one.

It suffers from similar funneling issues that Fracture has, but at least you can take control of mid and crush that Cypher b*stard from above.

It’s claustrophobic, sure, but in pro play it creates hype moments and some really interesting plays.

Oh, and flanks are deadly but tough to pull off in a timely fashion. As it should be.

Everything about this map is miles better than that hellhole Fracture. It’s not a good map, but it’s at least a tactical FPS map.

Riot’s refusal to let the playerbase create maps and have sole influence over map creation is going to lead to some terrible maps – and it’s imperative that they’re able to admit mistakes.

[Split] suffers from similar funneling issues that Fracture has, but at least you can take control of mid and crush that Cypher b*stard from above.

Least aggressive Cypher hater

Other games have big communities around creating maps, testing them and finding the good ones. We over at VALORANT have eight maps, all created by the same company and tested internally before they’re unloaded on us.

They won’t all be good, and they won’t all be ready to be played on the first test.

But we’re the ones who get screwed over by it.

Fracture is a blight on one of the greatest games ever created, and Riot’s refusal to acknowledge it will ruin the game faster than anything else possibly could.

#BringBackSplit