“League of Legends: Wild Rift”. Image: Riot Games via AFP Relaxnews
To demonstrate what “League of Legends: Wild Rift” is all about in a May 29 gameplay reveal, design lead Brian Feeney will answer a series of questions about the game and the studio’s plans for it.
Livestreamed through YouTube, the event’s start time equates to 8 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Eastern Time, 3 p.m. Coordinated Universal Time, 4 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, 5 p.m. Central European Summer Time and South Africa, 8:30 p.m. India and 11 p.m. in Beijing, China, as well as in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
It’ll premiere at midnight on March 30 in South Korea and Japan, and 1 a.m. for night owls in Australia.
There’s no rush though — the video will still be up on YouTube in the morning.
The showcase is taking place under the Summer Games Fest banner, running from May to August, and acting as part-replacement for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), a giant United States trade show which usually takes place in June but took the precaution of canceling its 2020 iteration in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On mobile, “Wild Rift” is currently being developed for iPhone 6 and up and Android devices with 1.5 Gigabyte random access memory (RAM), a Snapdragon 410 chip and an Adreno 306 graphics processing unit (GPU) or better.
The “Wild Rift” experience on console and mobile is to be kept separate from the “League of Legends” computer game so as not to have one version or the other introduce competitive disadvantages to the games’ esports scenes.
Debuting in 2009 and heavily inspired by “DotA”, a popular fan community modification to Blizzard Entertainment’s “Warcraft 3”, “League of Legends” is designed for teams of five and has become one of the world’s biggest esports titles in the time since, with an annual multi-million dollar world championship and over 111 million players every month.
The free game accrued $1.5 billion (P75.66 billion) in revenue over the course of 2019.
After ten years of “League of Legends”, Riot Games — a Californian studio owned by Chinese giant Tencent — began expanding its catalog roster with 2019’s “Teamfight Tactics”, part of a new Auto Battler genre which arose from Valve Corporation’s “Dota 2”.
“Wild Rift” is anticipated for launch in 2020, joining Riot’s digital card game “Legends of Runeterra” and June release “Valorant”, a team action game also geared for competitive play and going up against Valve’s “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive”, Blizzard’s “Overwatch” and Ubisoft’s “Rainbow Six Siege”.
Tencent released its own variant on the “League of Legends” formula through “Arena of Valor”, made available for iOS and Android in 2015 and then for Nintendo Switch in 2018. CL
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