Remember the good old days of April 2020? You know, when the biggest problem in our lives was queuing into Split for the fifth time in an hour and wondering if Riot had secretly deleted the other two maps from the beta just to mess with us? I sure do, because I was right there with Twitch streamer JoshOG, yelling into the void about how “boring” it was to play the same three maps over and over and over and over.

Oh, how naive we were.

Let’s rewind. The world was on lockdown, toilet paper was a luxury item, and VALORANT dropped into closed beta like a glittery, tactical nuke. We got three maps: Split, Bind, and Haven. Three whole maps. At the time, that felt like Riot had handed us a tricycle when we were expecting a motorcycle. Overwatch launched with 12 maps. PUBG at least had one gigantic map that took an entire afternoon to cross on foot. And here was VALORANT, this shiny new tactical shooter that everyone and their mom was desperate to play, giving us just enough variety to drive a person mildly insane.

JoshOG, blessed be his candor, put it bluntly on Twitter: “VALORANT is getting boring playing the same 3 maps over and over and over and over.” At the time, I nodded so hard my neck cracked. Haven’s three-site layout made my brain feel like a pretzel. Bind’s one-way teleporters turned every match into a psychological horror movie. And Split? Don’t even get me started on Mid control. I was ready to throw my monitor out the window after my tenth straight game on Split.

But here’s the thing: fast forward to 2026, and what do we have? I’ll tell you what we have. We have twenty-two maps in the active rotation (and another seven in casual modes, plus the two “experimental” maps that only appear if you queue at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday). Half of them have been reworked so many times that their original layout exists only in the memories of grizzled veterans who still pine for the days when A long on Haven wasn’t a four-lane highway of death. The other half are so convoluted that I need a PhD in Riot Geometry just to figure out where CT spawn even is.

Isn’t it funny how perspective works? In 2020, I thought three maps were the definition of monotony. Now? I would genuinely commit minor crimes to go back to a simpler time. No Sunset, no Lotus with its three sites that somehow feel like nine, no Abyss where you can fall into a bottomless pit because you sneezed at the wrong moment. Just Split, Bind, and Haven. The holy trinity.

Let me break down why those three maps were low-key masterpieces:

🎯 Split – The verticality king. Ropes, tight corridors, and a mid that felt like a cage match in a phone booth. Mastering Split meant you were either a god of aim duels or a rat hiding in the vents. There was no in-between.

🌀 Bind – The map that made teleporters a thing. No mid? No problem. Just send your Omen through a one-way portal and watch the enemy team collectively lose their minds. It was chaos, and we loved it.

🎯 Haven – Three sites, two defenders weeping in a corner, and a B site that everyone ignored until someone planted the spike and suddenly it was the most important piece of real estate in the universe. Haven taught us pain, and we thanked it for the lesson.

Compare that to the 2026 map pool nightmare:

Map Name	Gimmick That Makes Me Sigh	Times I’ve Fallen Off the Map
Fracture	Defenders start in the center, because why not?	0, but I’ve walked into walls
Breeze	Open spaces that make a sniper’s dream, my hell	2 (don’t ask)
Pearl	Underwater base, wet footsteps everywhere	0, but I still hear the water
Lotus	Three sites AND rotating doors	1 (door closed on me)
Sunset	It’s just… too pretty. Suspiciously pretty.	0, but I don’t trust it

Don’t even mention the “community favorites” that everyone begged Riot to bring back, only to realize that nostalgia is a liar and old maps were actually terrible. You know who you are.

So, was JoshOG right in 2020? In the moment, absolutely. Three maps were not enough to sustain a full-time streaming schedule without losing your marbles. But was he also wrong because he had no idea what was coming? Big time. We were like children complaining about having to eat the same three flavors of ice cream every day, blissfully unaware that the future held a 47-flavor parlor where half the options taste like disappointment and the other half require a tutorial to consume.

What’s the lesson here? Be careful what you wish for. I spent 2020 moaning about “over and over and over,” and now in 2026, I’m stuck on a map that has moving platforms, destructible walls, and an agent meta so complex that I need a spreadsheet just to play one round. I long for the days when my biggest decision was whether to push Hookah on Bind or lurk on B long. Simplicity, I took you for granted.

And to the new players who never experienced the beta: you’ll never understand the primal rage of getting Split four times in a row. But you also won’t know the pure joy of outplaying someone with a one-way teleporter on Bind. You have your fancy underwater labs and arena maps where the bomb can be defused from a zipline. I have my memories of 2020, and honestly? They still beat queuing into Abyss at three in the morning.

So here’s to you, JoshOG. You said what we all felt. And here’s to the three-map beta, the crucible that forged us. It was boring. It was repetitive. It was glorious. And I miss it every single time I load into Breeze.