Dive into the creation of Pearl with the developers of Valorant

Just over three months ago, Riot Games unveiled the new Valorant map: Pearl. This one is totally different from the others as it is located under the ocean. Today, the publisher of the FPS published a video on its social networks in which the developers of the game tell us more about its creation.

Why is Pearl underwater? What planet is it on exactly? Or why does it have this architectural style? These are questions you may be asking yourself. Well, the developers have answered them in the video that was recently posted on Twitter.

Pearl was born out of the desire of create something much simpler than Icebox, Breeze or Fracture. The developers wanted to focus on the geographical aspect of the map and not on a mechanical aspect. This is why it is located in Lisbon. The game teams wanted to revisit old Europe and Portugal, with its rich heritage, seemed the ideal place to set up this new map.

But it needed something extra to make it unique and stand out from the rest. One of the developers once expressed an idea: what if the ocean level had risen and the dome had been placed in that particular spot to protect that particular part of the city? Sold, Pearl would be an underwater map.

The fact that it is located under the ocean gave the game teams some real challenges, including adapt the brightness to be equivalent to the one in the water. So we had to increase all the artificial and wall lights to recreate something that looked believable.

Pearl has also created a technical challenge, as a lot of tweaking was needed to get the attackers to move down the map towards the defenders, but without the defenders feeling besieged all at once.

Finally, the developers have officially confirmed that there are two realities: the Alpha Earth and the Omega Earth which are in conflict. Pearl is located on Omega and thus offers players the opportunity to discover and visit a small piece of this planet. But since the map is not on Alpha, it could not have the same visual identity. They wanted something similar to Kingdom, but with a different atmosphere. The game teams wanted to create a unique visual language that would be Pearl's DNA and that is why they were inspired by what already exists, based on organic and parametric works by architects such as Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster.

Now you know more about the creation of this card. However, for more details, we invite you to look at Riot Games' video in its entirety.