Barely days after taking the map out of its active rotation, Valorant has already announced that Ascent will be returning much sooner than most players would have expected.
Heading into its fifth anniversary, the Valorant team isn’t one to settle. 2025 has already given players a new agent and VCT team capsules for the fresh competitive season. Now it’s also changing the available map pool to rotate every Act rather than once every six or so months. This gives players and teams approximately two months to adjust to any changes made to returning maps as well as to practice on the rollover maps. Yet despite the freshening up of the map pool, Valorant seemingly can’t give up one of the classics for long.
The official Valorant X account announced that the next map rotation would bring back some overly familiar layouts. And players aren’t exactly pleased that Ascent is now returning to active duty already.
Come approximately late February, maps Ascent and Icebox are returning to the competitive map pool in Valorant.
Ascent is the Valorant fourth map, released alongside the game’s debut in June 2020. Fans can recognize the layout from its Venetian setting and such features as mechanical doors leading to spikes and destructible glass panel leading into A Garden. Notably, it was the only map to remain consistently in rotation until patch 10.0.
Yet just days after the January 7 patch 10.0 update, Valorant has already announced that Ascent will be returning to the rotation in 10.04. This puts the approximate date around the end of February or early March. Many players and fans are now confused as to why Ascent is coming back to the game so fast. Other maps have spent much longer periods of time out of rotation, with Breezer being out of active competitive play for nearly nine months in 2023. Players seem to want a chance to try out other options. The Valorant team has not given a reason for Ascent’s rapid return.
Icebox is another map coming back to the competitive pool. With horizontal ziplines and varying elevation levels set deep in the Arctic, some fans argue that the map isn’t designed well and thus just isn’t fun to play. Icebox left the map pool rotation in October 2024. With several months of maintenance work potentially going into it, it’s possible that the development team could have made significant changes in the meantime.
Though Valorant has 11 standard maps, only seven are available at a time to players in competitive play. In patch 10.04, Ascent and Icebox will be replacing Abyss and Bind. The next competitive map pool will then consist of:
Typically, when maps leave rotation they come back with changes meant to improve gameplay or other issues. It is unclear yet what changes Ascent and Icebox will return with, if any.
Alongside the brief break and subsequent return of Ascent, Valorant has a number of other alterations coming for its 2025 season regarding episodes and esports.
Though some of the changes may seem small in the short term, the Valorant team looks to be trying to make long term adjustments. For instance, players will have to say goodbye to episodes in exchange for one year-long Season 2025. The new schedule will contain six acts and a ranked reset in the middle of the season. Additionally, players can once again access the Esports hub in 2025, and can now easily kick out AFK players from a game with an automatic remake vote.
Fans still have another month or two to grind Abyss and Bind before Valorant replaces them with Ascent and Icebox. Hopefully, even the most annoyed players will find some level of enjoyment in the new Valorant map rotation for 2025.
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