Team-based shooters like Valorant regularly add new heroes, but they’re not generally in the business of banishing them. Unfortunately, after a recent update, Valorant’s shadow-dwelling Reaper riff, Omen, transcended the game’s figurative and literal boundaries, which forced Riot to give him the (temporary) boot.
This week, a Valorant patch not intended to make Omen briefly invincible and able to teleport through barriers did exactly that. The former issue led to some extremely funny (but obviously game-breaking) scenes that involved way too much blood, and Riot acted on it in fairly short order. However, the teleportation issue persisted.
In short, Omen could get through the barriers that typically prevent teams from moving through the map before rounds. He was able to do this by teleporting into teammates standing on raised surfaces. Valorant is a game all about timing and positioning, so this issue was functionally almost as game-breaking as invulnerability. In a tweet yesterday, Riot declared victory over the issue with a hotfix, only to realise that evening that it had misjudged what it was up against.
“What we thought was a map bug for Omen teleporting past the spawn barriers… is actually an issue with Omen, so we’re disabling him until we have a real fix,” Riot said on Twitter last night. “Sorry for all of the disruptions.”
As of now, Omen is still disabled. However, Riot announced this afternoon that, if all goes according to plan, he’ll be back tomorrow — specifically, at 4 p.m. AEST. Then everything will be right as rain. Or, a couple hours later, Riot will post a foreboding tweet that reads “Oh no, that just made him madder,” after which Riot will never be heard from again.
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