Rubbing salt in the cultural wound, Kingdom’s bleak refining towers loom over the landscape, gushing out streams of black smoke, clashing with what remains of the regional architecture and spoiling the distant view of the Atlas Mountains. A number of vents in this area also suggest Kingdom’s facility here extends deep underground. The brunt of Kingdom’s presence in Bind is focused on the northern edge of the perimeter.īetween the reactor and laboratory, gloomy industrial panels cordon off the remains of elaborate Moorish archways – a once elegant building, now in mid-demolition, vultured to the bones by cranes in a mournful act of corporate ignorance. Despite Kingdom Corporation’s wanton corporate corruption of the area, however, fragments of local culture survive to catch the eye across the Bind map perimeter. Much of the cultural and historic values of this area have been coarsely swept aside to pave way for K-CORP’s relentless pursuit of progress and profits.
It's an opportunity for the many arseholes of Valorant to pour scorn over newer players, which they are all too eager to take.Īscent Attacker Side Spawn IS clearly Oreo, when you think about it.Like Split, Bind is a prime example of Kingdom Corp’s invasive “regardless of the costs” attitude.
And while I do find this sort of thing delightful for the most part, there is also a degree to which it is exclusionary. I'm not denying that the spot does look a bit like a hookah bar, but I still had to ask. It's all because players came up with their own agreed on names before Riot came up with official ones. That's not true of Hookah on Bind, which only sort of makes sense, despite that being more common than the official "Window". Everyone will immediately know where you're talking about.
Loads of bomb sites offer an elevated position where people often snipe from, and those tend to universally be called heaven (or just "high"). I'm mentioning it because this aspect interests me too - not the private calls that you'd never share with randomers, but the widely-accepted terminology that people often use instead of official map call outs. RPS weekend news editor Nat Clayton doesn't play Valorant, but she has incepted me with the notion that the banana shaped part of Haven, A-long, should in fact be called "Banana", in line with tradition established by an old Counter-Strike map. Relatedly, and very nearly as good, Henry Stenhouse told me that for his group, "anywhere we don't know on any map is called Graffiti because of one time we played a random CS:GO map that had graffiti on five different places, confusing us all". well, because some streamers from the early days of Valorant misheard the developers say "new hall", if this Reddit post is to be believed. He also told me it's commonly called "U-Haul", because. He told me that Lamps on Bind "is now sometimes called Kitty Cat because a friend sprayed over it with a cat spray and it kind of stuck". My favourite, though, came from Games Radar guides editor Ford James. That's arguably not that inventive, but that's also arguably made up for by the way it acknowledges the slime gelatos. I haven't asked how this happened and that's part of the appeal.Įlsewhere on Ascent, Michael "Wheels" Whelan ( of Dicebreaker fame) told me that his group refers to this bit near the attacker's spawn as "near the slime gelato". It turned out he meant here, in the part officially marked B-main. He didn't tell me where he meant and I spent a very enjoyable five minutes trying to figure out where on earth he was talking about. Jason Coles (editor of The Indie Game Website) told me that his friends "call one of the areas BBQ", even though "it's definitely not a BBQ". I will lead with what other people have come up with, because honestly they're far more inventive than us. I asked Twitter for a peek into the private nomenclature of other friendship groups, and I'm very glad I did. It's the linguistic Wild West, and it delights me. These are important, because you often need to very quickly communicate where an enemy is. A nice side benefit, though, is that you wind up with your own private and superior ways of describing parts of the map. Friends are a key component of Riot's snazzy new wizard FPS, primarily because they won't (usually) swear at you when you do something stupid. Valorant is great, when it isn't making me sad.