An official League of Legends MMO is on the way, helmed by Greg Street, former lead designer of World of Warcraft. The iconic MOBA is still going strong, 11 years after it first released. Riot has been furnishing it with a steady stream of new characters and content, and this seems to have paid off in a big way; the League of Legends community was the single most active gaming community on Reddit this year, for instance.
Though that isn’t to say it’s all been smooth sailing. League of Legends has had its fair share of controversy in 2020, most notably through the introduction of its new character Seraphine. In order to market the new champion, Riot set her up with a real life social media presence maintained by a staff of writers. “Seraphine” would regularly share tweets chronicling her career as an indie musician. This was a quaint marketing campaign, but it went sour when Seraphine began to Tweet about anxiety and mental health issues. This behavior was deemed inappropriate by many fans who saw it as a corporate ploy. Riot issued an apology for this, and promised to approach the topic with more tact in the future.
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But in spite of all this controversy, League of Legends is doing well enough for Riot to branch out. One major way that the title is expanding is through the recently announced turn-based RPG Ruined King, but fans have since received word of another major topic from a very unlikely place. Greg Street, current Riot Games VP of IP and entertainment, announced that his recent work developing the League of Legends universe is leading to the creation of a major project that fans have apparently been yearning for for a long time. When asked by a fan if this project is an MMO, Street gave a surprisingly straightforward answer: “It is an MMO”. In an industry so full of teases and carefully timed reveals, having an industry head state the identity of such a major project without any ceremony at all is quite jarring.
That isn’t to say it’s not exciting, though. Riot has cooked up a staggering amount of lore for League of Legends, but since it’s a PVP game, that lore rarely comes up in-game. Players are understandably more concerned with fighting each other than with learning the secret backstories of all the characters. As Street himself pointed out, this MMO is a great way to expand the lore of the game and deliver more story content for fans who want in, while at the same time (ideally) delivering good MMO gameplay for fans who just want to exist in the League of Legends world.
Street’s prior experience with World of Warcraft will surely serve him well in the development of this game; World of Warcraft is one of the most famous MMORPGs of all time, and it’s also been doing very well for itself lately thanks to the recent Shadowlands expansion. If the new League of Legends MMO is anywhere near as successful as that iconic game, Riot is going to have an instant classic on their hands, and a wonderful new product for its devoted fanbase.
Source: Greg Street
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