Arena of Valor (AoV) - Nintendo Switch Release Scheduled for September

An "Unlisted" video on Arena of Valor's official YouTube channel surfaced, "announcing" the Nintendo Switch release for AoV to be scheduled for September 2018.

Arena of Valor’s Nintendo Switch to be (Finally!) Released

Arena of Valor released a video early today, August 21 (August 20 in North America), to their official YouTube account “announcing” that the game’s long-awaited release is now officially scheduled for September. We put “announcing” in quotations because the video is currently Unlisted – meaning regular users cannot find the video by browsing the Arena of Valor channel. We’re unsure if Arena of Valor accidentally published it before reverting it to Unlisted, or if users found the video using other methods, but Samurai Gamers first stumbled upon it via the Arena of Valor subreddit.

After previously announcing a release timing in “Fall 2018,” the news that it will be in the earliest possible month of September is certainly a pleasant surprise. That said, Arena of Valor players have been yanked around before, like when Tencent initially delayed the Americas release from November 2017 to sometime in 2018, only to later surprise everyone by suddenly announcing that the release would be the next day (December 19, 2017). Hopefully that’s not the case and our dream of finally playing Arena of Valor on the Nintendo Switch comes next month.

Unanswered Questions Regarding the Switch Version

Other than the September release and the global server, the one-minute, eight-second video doesn’t answer any more questions regarding the Switch version. The video promises 30+ heroes, but there are already 70 on Tencent servers at the time of writing, meaning Switch users may have to slowly catch up to the hero pool of the rest of the world the same way many mobile servers had to (some are still not caught up).

There were also a few issues when we tested out the beta version in late June/early July, and we’re curious to see how many they were able to iron out in a relatively short period of time. Plus, with a completely re-designed map having made its way to multiple servers already, we’re curious as to which map the Switch Version will use. Given that all of the beautiful Switch graphics were built from the ground up, it could be a major undertaking to completely re-do the map before release.

Is This What Tencent Has Been Doing?

Excuse the accusatory section header, but Tencent has been extremely quiet over the past month to month-and-a-half. In particular, Garena Taiwan (and multiple other servers) have gone through two separate updates – the latter vastly changing the game – while Tencent has yet to implement (or even announce) either. Meanwhile, posts complaining about Rourke‘s tower bug (fixed in July in Taiwan) seem to come on a daily basis on the subreddit, and for good reason: players are currently forced to use one of their bans on him in Diamond and Master ranks.

While the Switch version was initially handled by an entirely separate team, it’s certainly possible that all hands were on deck to make sure that the Switch version came out on time. Based on our own page view statistics, interest in Arena of Valor rose following the AWC, and you can’t blame Tencent for wanting to keep the momentum up by getting Arena of Valor out on the Nintendo Switch as quickly as possible.

Past Arena of Valor Nintendo Switch News

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