Playing smokes in VALORANT might lead to some worrying moments in ranked, whether it’s due to inexperience in the role or landing the right smokes on time, but nothing compares to what this Omen bug does to lobbies.
This Omen player spawned into one of their Spike Rush games with a black sky and a purple map, as shown on a Reddit post from July 24. This normally is what Omen players see when they place smokes across the map, but only for seconds at a time. Instead, this player has their Breeze gameplay obscured by the purple haze all around.
Each smoke has its own way of looking around the map, so smokes agents can place smokes wherever they want. Brimstone has the screen on his arm, showing the map in a traditional top-down view. Astra has to soar through the map to place her smokes, and use the other abilities it provides.
For Omen players, they enter this smoke form and can move far across the map to place it.
In this strange case though, the player simply never exits it. Instead, the unlucky Omen is stuck staring into the void.
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It’s not entirely clear how this bug came to be, with the clip starting 10 seconds before players leave spawn. The player is confused, walking around, making sure it wasn’t something that would disappear after a couple of seconds. Sounds in the game are the same, but two key things are different: this unlucky Omen can’t see their teammates or enemies. Only their teammates’ name tags show, and as they try to peek, they get shot by enemies they can’t even spot.
This adds another minor bug, funnily enough, because when normally in this smoke form, enemies appear as red on Omen’s screen. That gives Omen players the chance to exit the smoke form and fight if an enemy pops up. Instead, that doesn’t show, which is a pretty major problem for a game that relies on gunfights above all else.
As much as the bug makes the game harder, it’s also funny, with the top comment saying “lore accurate Omen” to the thread’s enjoyment.
Another comment highlighted the same small problem I faced when writing this article: the map is almost unrecognizable with this bug. For a lot of players, it took a while to realize it was Breeze.
This form of the bug is relatively new, with Riot Games yet to officially address it. But his isn’t the first instance of this smoke form staying longer than needed, with a video in 2022 showing an animation cancel leading to this problem. It was fixed, but this one seems to have a different starting point that Riot will have to find and fix soon.
