Riot Games havs been making great strides in expanding the scope of its flagship MOBA League of Legends, its most recent effort being League of Legends: Wild Rift, a special adaptation of the world renowned team-fight experience built from the ground up for consoles and mobile platforms. Having just announced the project moving to an open beta, the team behind League of Legends: Wild Rift has also decided that a European release will be pushed back to December, where US audiences will be waiting until spring of 2021.
Alongside its contemporaries, League of Legends has not only established the staying power of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena genre, but served to evolve the gameplay experience with accessibility and player satisfaction in mind. Riot's decision to bring the Summoner's Rift to mobile and console aims to achieve just that with more than just a port of the PC version of the game.
League of Legends: Wild Rift will bear a number of differences from the core League of Legends match format while adhering to the feel and spirit of the original PC version. As the game will now control via touchscreens and controllers instead of a mouse and keyboard, several accuracy intensive characters from the base game's imposing 145 champion roster have been deemed unfit for the new pick-up-and-play style of League of Legends: Wild Rift. Instead, Riot has decided to start their beta with an impressive 40 characters based on popularity and ease of use with the new controls in mind.
Aside from some necessary UI changes, the map has been reduced in size and the level cap has been lowered in order to better facilitate faster games with scaled experience gain over the PC's typical 20-minute skirmish. Riot has experimented multiple times with adapting the baseline Summoner's Rift experience to a shorter format with several rotating alternate game modes in the past, likely paving the way for League of Legends: Wild Rift's development.
Despite plans to eventually release League of Legends: Wild Rift worldwide, the game's open beta will be made available first to eastern servers, including Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. The game's westward release will begin with Europe, the Middle East and Russia slated for December of 2020, and eventually reach the US by a projected spring of 2021. As the MOBA genre remains a wildly popular phenomenon the world over, this measured release pattern could likely be an attempt to prevent excessive stress-testing during League of Legends: Wild Rift's continuing development.
League of Legends: Wild Rift is coming to iOS and Android 2021.
Source: The Verge