Riot Games is Trying to Kill Blizzard: the 10th Anniversary Announcements

Riot’s 10th anniversary special broadcast saw a wild amount of announcements - both to do with their flagship (and to date only) game, League of Legends, as well as myriad new game announcements. Felix Games gives the run-down, as well as speculates on what this signals in terms of Riot’s business plan going forward

The 10th-anniversary celebration of League of Legends took place a few days ago – and oh boy, did Riot pull out all the stops.

The day began with some fun streams with various Riot employees – such as a live concert of League music, a ‘Twitch Plays’, where the chat was used to drive a robot around Riot HQ, and (my personal favourite) an artist stream: where quick concept art was made for a variety of meme-worthy skin ideas. KDA Gragas was a particular highlight.

However, the real show began with a special episode of ‘Riot Pls’, the studio’s version of a video dev blog. We at Felix Games are going to break down the changes they announced for League – as well as the incredibly spicy news they shared about finally putting the ‘s’ in Riot ‘Games’.

First, pre-season changes. They’ve thematically dubbed the changes “Rise of the Elements”. We’ll be diving into these in detail soon as more information is revealed, but in short: welcome to RNG city. The randomly-spawning elemental dragons (drakes) will now cause permanent changes to the map depending on which drake spawns third – such as destroying or building walls (laughs in Qiyana) or adding extra brushes to the map (laughs in Rengar). Drake effects have been tweaked too, especially the Elder Dragon, which now no longer amplifies the effects of previously-taken drakes but instead offers execution below a certain health threshold. They’ve given everybody Pyke ultimate on every damaging ability – dear lord, it’s the end of days.

Additionally, they’ve added extra brushes to the jungle and small ‘alcoves’ to the sidelanes – time for the rise of Shaco support – as well as a slew of item and XP tweaks. Lastly, they revealed a teaser for a new marksman support champion: Senna, Lucian’s wife, whose soul was previously trapped in Thresh’s lantern. Fun fact: Thresh used to start with one soul stacked already whenever he faced Lucian, which presumably will have to change.

Lastly: yes, the rumours were true. League is going to console and mobile with a revamped set of mechanics and models that were built from the ground-up, as is TFT. This is reassuring for mobile game or console enthusiasts – after all, a pure port of a MOBA like League just wouldn’t work. The visuals of this new version, dubbed ‘Wild Rift’, look particularly impressive, with some pretty awesome character animations that seem to play as an introduction (possibly in champ select) – but whether it feels good to play will have to be seen.

Oh – and classic URF is coming back for a couple of weeks. Karthus-induced carpal tunnel (which I’m dubbing Karthpal tunnel) incoming. TFT is also getting a new seasonal set of champions, essentially hitting reset on the meta and starting from the beginning!

Now – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – that’s the ‘boring’ news out of the way. What a world we live in when those changes are the vanilla ones. Let’s dig into the plethora of new games Riot has just announced!

‘Project L’: The Fighting Game

Riot announced that they were working on a fighting game at EVO this year after the information had previously been leaked, having acquired the development team who were working on the highly-anticipated and then cancelled ‘Rising Thunder’ game three years ago. However, this is the first time early development gameplay has been shown – and it looks incredibly slick. The game will feature characters from Runeterra and League, with Darius, Jinx, Ahri, and Katarina being seen duking it out in the preview. Sadly, the announcement came with a caveat: there won’t be any more information for a while. It’s exciting nonetheless.

One thing that fighting game enthusiasts will be excited to hear is that Riot is working on some form of new netcode technology aimed at reducing the impact of latency and ping on gameplay – which was officially announced as part of the next game on our list.

‘Project A’: The Tactical Shooter

The first game announced by Riot that is completely separate from League and the world of Runeterra, ‘Project A’ is a character-based tactical shooter with a whole new set of characters and a fresh near-future Earth setting. There are few details available for now, but on the gameplay side a lot of focus seems to be going toward developing high-impact character abilities and smooth gunplay to keep the game competitive. Furthermore, a lot of investment is going into high-end infrastructure changes, to combat issues such as aimbots and ‘peeker’s advantage’ (where latency means the person peeking around a corner gets information, and a chance to shoot, before the person on the other side.) More details will be shared throughout 2020.

Legends of Runeterra: The Card Game

Ah, Riot isn’t even trying to hide it at this point: this is a Hearthstone-killer. However, it doesn’t appear to be just another clone. There was a real sense from the devs that this is a passion project – one they’re committed to keeping free from the evils of randomised loot boxes for cards. The game will feature League and other Runeterra-based champions as powerful cards, with a supporting cast of cards with both familiar and unfamiliar faces. This project seems by far the closest to completion, with alpha pre-registration already active and early gameplay being streamed after the main show. (If you’re a card-game nut, get in touch and let us know what you think so far!)

‘Project F’???: The ARPG(?)

Yes, that is a lot of question marks. Riot conspicuously displayed what appeared to be a Diablo-style ARPG, potentially with MMO elements, in the background of their announcements, but didn’t offer any comment. I know; they’re just teasing us at this point. We’ll refrain from diving too heavily into speculation, but the short gameplay clips of an isometric Blitzcrank, goomba-stomping minions already look like a blast.

Esports Manager

Finally! The return of some form of fantasy esports for League! The game will feature two modes: a campaign-style single-player game, and a ranked system where you can compete against others. Sadly, it will initially launch with only LPL teams in 2020 but apparently will look to expand to include other regions. As soon as they do, I’m creating what I’m half-convinced will actually be the 2020 G2 team with role-swapping Perkz as support, Caps as ADC, and Faker in mid – the memes are just too good to resist. There’s further good news: a portion of all proceeds will be reinvested back into the pro scene!

And the honourable mentions…

There’s a couple of other things worth mentioning here – yes, even more. Firstly, there was a very brief mention and a snippet of a potential new board game being developed – but not enough information to say anything concrete just yet. Secondly – Riot announced a full-on animated show called Arcane, which seems to be based on the history of Jinx and Vi in the conjoined microcosms of the Runeterran cities of Zaun and Piltover. Champions like Ekko and Ezreal were also spotted in the extended trailer previewed during the show. Fans of League have been asking for it for years and years – and finally, Riot has delivered, with an expected release date within the next year.

So what does all this mean?

The clue is in the title. Not only has Riot managed to mostly keep the development of most of these games a complete secret, but they’ve also managed to organically announce them at the perfect moment.

Blizzard has, for a long time, had a powerful influence on the Western gaming market. With huge blockbuster successes like World of Warcraft and Starcraft under their belt, Blizzard has shaped entire genres and arguably kickstarted the modern esports phenomenon. Over the years, they’ve expanded their collection of games, often championing a single game per genre. They have Hearthstone for card games; Overwatch for shooters; Heroes of the Storm for MOBAs; WoW for MMORPGs; Diablo for ARPGs; and so on. Each of these games overlaps and (whether canon or not) inherit lore and style and context from one another – Heroes of the Storm, for example, features characters from across all of Blizzard’s library. Each is also managed via the Blizzard launcher, a centralised app for all their games.

Riot has, in short, decided that they’re going to war with Blizzard. Having announced the development of a suite of games drawing from the same universe – Runeterra – they’ve set themselves up to emulate the same business model. This is no accident; Riot has even recently revamped the launcher for League into a more general Riot Games launcher, with the now-apparent intention of using it as a base launcher for a variety of games in the same way as Blizzard does. They even jokingly referenced Blizzard’s gaff last year (regarding the comment on whether players have phones) while delivering their mobile announcements.

They’re going even further: several of their newly-announced games will be direct competitors to flagship Blizzard titles. ‘Project A’ will compete with Blizzard’s character-based shooter Overwatch, Legends of Runeterra similarly seeks to entice Hearthstone’s playerbase, and the ARPG-style game will draw Diablo fans. More than this, what little we have heard about these games so far seems to aim to directly address the biggest criticisms of Blizzard’s equivalents: netcode for Overwatch (and shooters in general) and microtransactions for Hearthstone.

And it’s the perfect moment. Blizzard’s recent controversies have left them vulnerable – a lukewarm Blizzcon last year, the casual axing of the entire Heroes of the Storm esports scene, and most recently banning and rescinding the winnings of a tournament player who shouted “liberate Hong Kong” in a post-game interview. Riot must have been planning these announcements months in advance – but fortune has smiled upon them, as the giants they’re hoping to slay have shot themselves in the foot just over a week prior.

Only time will tell if this incredibly bold market takeover will be successful – but aside from all that, frankly, I’m just excited to play some amazing-looking games.