VALORANT lore enthusiasts are going to have fun with this one.
VALORANT‘s upcoming map, Fracture, is slated to go live next week with Episode Three, Act Two. And theorycrafters are sure to scour its landscape for tidbits of lore and Easter eggs. But a potential teaser may further indicate that a well-dressed agent is on the horizon.
The following sections will contain spoilers and theories. Any fans who want to sift through Fracture and create their own conjectures should wait until the map goes live.
The Fracture trailer that premiered earlier this week featured a mysterious voice narrating as two bullets met from opposite directions to destroy a reactor. Riot previously teased an image of a snazzy figure named Deadeye in the Year One Anthem, who has glasses, hair slicked back, and a long-barreled weapon resting on his shoulder. While Riot has yet to confirm anything, it appears that a teaser on the outskirts of Fracture furthers this theory.
By using Ghost mode to escape the confines of the map, players can see two gun cases, two old cellphones, and what appears to be two cameras set up on opposite sides of Fracture. And each area has a perfect vantage point of the reactor in the middle of the map. This stands to reason that the new agent, and potentially their mirror version, were in communication to destroy the reactor together.
Fracture likely gets its name from a huge fissure dividing the map into two landscapes, one arid and desert-like, the other filled with overgrown foliage. But it goes further than simply two separate ecosystems. Certain Easter eggs suggest that these two landscapes actually represent Earth-1 and its mirrorverse, or Alpha and Omega.
Signs littered all over the map read “Alpha Sector” when on the lush foliage sections and “Omega Sector” when on the sandy desert sections, paired with the Kingdom logo (which also varies depending on which side you’re on). And posters on the wall propose that the two worlds have different outlooks on life. Alpha posters read “Earth, preserve our future” and “dare to dream,” while Omega posters take on a more authoritarian tone with “less talking, more doing,” and “enforce routine, teleport clean.”
Riot also added a couple of interactable objects that hint at Kingdom being aware of both worlds’ existence. In the defenders’ spawn during the buy phase, players can read two telling messages from computers on opposite ends. On the Alpha side, a message from the K-SEC Team welcomes a man named Oran McEneff to the Everett-Linde Research Lab and says that he’ll be paired up with Ruben Pontes from the Omega side. The computer on the Omega side is linked to Pontes’ inbox, where McEneff asks him to do a “walkthrough of the Easter support structure” and “double check everything.”
This subtle interaction likely confirms that Kingdom has a role in the mirrorverse conflict, where Earth-1’s Radianite store is under attack by the mirror agents. But this obviously leaves fans with many unanswered questions. How exactly is Kingdom involved? Why did the mysterious agent destroy the Radian Collider and were they working with their mirror version? Where are all of the Everett-Linde Research Lab inhabitants now? And what was McEneff so paranoid about?
While Riot has yet to confirm any of these theories, more VALORANT lore is likely on the horizon. For fans who want to jump into Fracture and continue the treasure hunt, the map goes live with Patch 3.05 on Sept. 8.
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