Riot Games has announced that it has indefinitely disabled the Valorant Escalation gameplay mode while it investigates "an issue".
Speaking via X (formerly known as Twitter), Riot says Escalation won't be available across any of the platforms on which Valorant is playable while the studio investigates this "issue". It doesn't provide any further information regarding what the issue might be.
Riot also says that Escalation will be back in Patch 9.03, but we're not sure when that will be landing either. Judging by the timing of previous Valorant updates, you can expect to wait around a month for it, so it looks like Escalation won't be back until at least mid-August.
Given that Riot hasn't provided any further details, it looks like we'll just have to wait and see what the issue was that caused Escalation to be disabled.
In the meantime, you can pore over the patch notes for Patch 9.01, which was released earlier today. This being a relatively incremental patch, there aren't many earth-shattering changes, but there are plenty of bug fixes and balance adjustments.
Console players, for instance, can now play on the Lotus map across the game's Unrated, Competitive, Swift Play, and Deathmatch modes (although Deathmatch has also been temporarily disabled on consoles, owing once again to "an issue").
Other minor changes include an updated Outlaw animation that makes it "more apparent when the weapon is ready to be fired", as well as tons of bug fixes and small Agent changes.
If you're not familiar with Valorant, it's a free-to-play hero shooter that blends the character-based abilities of Overwatch with the objective-focused gameplay of Counter-Strike.
The game features a number of Agents, each of which has different abilities to help them triumph over their opponents. Gameplay takes place across a number of labyrinthine maps with lots of winding corridors and opportunities to ambush your enemies.
You can check out Valorant for free right now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. If you're hesitant to take the plunge on console, you can check out our preview to see how well the game makes the jump from PC.
