VALORANT Updates: Season 2025, New Agent & More

This week, VALORANT kicked off Season 2025 with several updates – a new Initiator from Colombia,
calendar updates for players and more. Please check out highlights below along with accompanying links
for more information:

Meet Tejo
Gameplay trailer HERE
● A veteran intelligence consultant from Colombia, Tejo’s ballistic guidance system pressures the
enemy to relinquish their ground – or their lives. His targeted strikes keep opponents off balance
and under his heel.

Welcome to Season 2025

Full video by VALORANT studio head, Anna Donlon, HERE

● VALORANT Champions is moving down the calendar to October to create a much better overall
pacing for the year.
● VALORANT is saying goodbye to the Episodes format and introducing Seasons. This year will be
the official kickoff of Season 2025 or for those who like fewer syllables, V25.
● Acts will stay and there will be six per year, mainly representing meaningful periods of gameplay
like they do now such as ranked, battlepasses, map rotations and Premier stages.
● On the narrative front, the team will be experimenting with even more ways to bring the
VALORANT universe to life this season – from agent voicelines, different cinematics and other
places for players to discover along the way.

Introducing Flex
Developer video HERE
● Flex is a new cosmetic content type in the form of handheld objects that players can use to
further express themselves in the game. It is equipped via Collections and appear in game in a
player’s Spray Wheel.
● Players can equip a Flex at any time, whether that’s before a round starts, during the round when
gameplay is happening or celebrating at the end of a round.
● Flex animations will not be visible from a third-person perspective to ensure gameplay integrity is
not compromised.
● There is no gameplay advantage to using a Flex; players will be running at ability speed, not
knife-speed.
● To celebrate the launch of Flex this week, VALORANT awarded players with a free Flex with a
second Flex available in the paid track of the Season 2025 // Act I Battlepass.
Below is a summary of VALORANT’s 2025 developer updates. For more information, check out the full
video HERE.
Gameplay Balance
● For the first half of 2025, the team is taking a look at some agent changes, including power
budget redistribution around Iso’s kit and adjusting Deadlock to have more aggressive potential.
● Map pools will be rotating with every Act to increase variety throughout the year. To support this
change, the team will be announcing the next act’s map pool shortly after the current act starts.
● For 2025, the team’s priority is to continue deepening the opportunities for strategic and
mechanical mastery. Changes like the accuracy updates to gunplay and movement is an

example of the ways the team is already deepening the mastery loop. You can expect them to
look at other ways to raise the skill ceiling for good tactical play.
Competitive Updates & Player Behavior
● Rank Shield is being added to give players an additional buffer of games before falling between
major ranks like Gold 1 to Silver 3.
● RR rollbacks are being introduced. When a player gets banned for cheating, losses to RR will be
restored from a certain period of time from matches that the player was in.
● Warning notices were sent out to over half a million players who had been repeat disruptors.
Then, any players who continued to be disruptors received harsher penalties than typical.
● The bans and warnings were very effective at reducing repeat disruption. Warnings alone
dropped expected repeat disruption rate by 25%.
● The team is continuing to learn and iterate on this manual review approach, looking into
additional ways to improve feedback and visibility around behavior in-game.
● Voice evaluation services have launched across the globe, with just Korea left. The team is
currently evaluating global english to see what performance looks like, with the next step being
adding additional language support.
● Remakes are receiving some changes. A Remake vote will automatically start when a player has
abandoned the match in the first round. Only 3 players are needed to successfully vote to
remake.
Replays
● The team is currently working through Lag Compensation.
● Lag compensation can make the server’s view look a little different from what you see during
play. Meaning, a replay could potentially show inaccuracies during playback.
● The team is actively discussing how replays should visualize shots in matches where pings are
high. It’s a tricky problem! All solutions have downsides, and there’s not an obviously correct
choice.
● The team is still evaluating what’s best to show in replays and will have another update to share
later this year.
VALORANT Esports
● Each International League is being expanded to 12 teams, with five new teams joining through
Ascension – 2Game Esports, XLG Esports, Apeks, Nongshim RedForce and Boom Esports.
● VALORANT Esports will be visiting three new cities with our global events – Masters Bangkok will
take players to Southeast Asia, Masters Toronto will be the first event in the Americas since
Champions 2023 and Paris will be the host of VALORANT Champions.
● This year, the team is also introducing a brand new season capsule with a new melee — similar
to LOCK//IN in 2023.
● The team is introducing a number of changes to the International Leagues including bigger
playoffs to give teams more chances to qualify for global events and a longer break after Masters
Toronto allow teams to try new things ahead of the final stage of the season.
● Championship points are being reworked to have a deeper point distribution, not only to the
winner. Teams will have new chances to qualify and come back at every point, while also being
rewarded for a strong season-long performance and all the work they put in early in the year.