Valorant's New Game Mode Is Spike Rush, Still No Team Deathmatch

Valorant launched on Tuesday, June 2, and with the official version 1.0 release of the game comes a brand-new game mode. GameSpot's Play For All interview with executive producer Anna Donlon provided more details on Riot's thought process when designing the short, but "chaotic" mode, which is called Spike Rush. While Valorant is fully launched out of its own beta, Spike Rush has been added in what Donlon describes as an early "beta state."

Unlike the default bomb mode, Spike Rush gives every player on the attacker side a spike--the objective is to plant just one. All agents' basic abilities are refilled for free and there's no pre-round buy phase, so every player is given the same random weapon at the start. On top of that, there are only seven rounds max. But to mix things up further, there are several orbs scattered around the map, which grant different power-ups if you pick them up. These abilities are not "core" to your agent's abilities and include things like "hyper speed" or a quick weapon upgrade, which "kind of creates a level of chaos and mystery into the mode," Donlon told GameSpot.

According to Donlon, a single match of Spike Rush should only take about 7-10 minutes to get through and provide "some really good in-between games downtime." Compared to the much longer and more competitive default game mode, which can take around an hour to finish, Spike Rush sounds like the kind of quick and casual mode players have been asking for on paper. But there's still another highly requested game mode that, according to Donlon, players won't get their hands on just yet: Team Deathmatch.

Donlon told GameSpot that Riot is "looking into" a Team Deathmatch mode, but that it will require some adjustments to work, as "[Valorant] isn't perfectly tailored" to just drop in that style of gameplay. Anyone who has played Counter-Strike will know how much Valorant is shaped by the competitive aspects of that series' legacy, including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive--but even CS:GO includes several casual modes that function as a low-stakes "warm-up" before a more serious match, which is precisely what the Valorant community is looking for.

"We know that's a big ask," said Donlon. "So that's definitely one of the next modes we're looking at, but not one that we're gonna have right at launch."

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