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Pearl is the latest map in Valorant and will be available in the Competitive queue tomorrow. It went live with Patch 5.0 on June 22, with the launch of the new Episode.
Riot Games have followed a trend of releasing a new map into Valorant's pool and giving players a couple of weeks to get familiar with it. They then push the map to the Competitive queue after the said two weeks are over.
Following the same pattern, it has been almost two weeks since the launch of Pearl, and Valorant's Twitter account has teased its addition to the Competitive queue.
Pearl set to join Valorant's Competitive queue tomorrow
The map will join the Competitive queue along with the new patch, which goes live tomorrow:
- 2.00 PM PDT
- 5.00 PM ET
- 10.00 PM BST
- 2.30 AM IST (next day, July 14)
- 7.00 AM JST (next day, July 14)
The timing might change a bit if Riot Games faces any issues with launching the new patch, however it's highly unlikely that such a problem will pop up.
Pearl was launched with the new patch in the Unrated queue and since then, players have got a chance to experience it. The community has also put out tons of lineups and tricks for the new map on their socials.
Level Designer at Riot Games, Joe Lansford, has claimed that Pearl is deceptively simple when compared to previous maps such as Breeze, Fracture and Icebox. Players should still expect some twists and quite a bit of depth to it. He stated:
“After Icebox, Breeze, and Fracture, we wanted to make a map that was a little more straightforward. Pearl demands committed engagements without the rotation and mobility support of doors, ascenders, or teleporters. What you get is something deceptively simple, strategically speaking. That said, it still has some twists and all the depth you’d expect from a Valorant map.”
As per the developers, Pearl's location is somewhere off the coast of Lisbon in Portugal. It is a well-designed map situated under the sea and protected by a dome.
Since it's one of the largest maps in the game and provides players with a lot of playability and opportunities to experiment, it will be a great addition to Valorant's ranked queue.
Split has been temporarily removed from Valorant’s Competitive and Unrated queues in Episode 5 Act I. Riot consulted a few professional organizations and took surveys from players, and finally decided that they wanted to keep the total number at seven, which meant that one of the older maps had to be taken out of the pool.
Riot Games eventually decided that the map would be Split, based on the time since its release, player surveys, updates, and what it brought in terms of strategic variance.
