It certainly has been a busy week for Riot Games. With multiple promotional images, an overview of 2020 plans so far, and the release of a dazzling new cinematic, Season 10 of League of Legends officially started yesterday with a flood of players rushing into ranked play. However, this is far from the end of announcements as a new video featuring Riot Ghostcrawler was uploaded today titled “Universe in 2020”.
As lead of the IP team, Ghostcrawler talked about Riot’s efforts to bring the world of Runeterra and all of its regions, characters, and stories to life. He first backtracked to 2018 when Riot physically mapped out the different cities and locations players heard about for years. Then 2019 focused more on several regions and characters such as Sylas’ release expanding the lore of Demacia as well as backgrounds of Lux and Garen. Finally, Ghostcrawler talked about moving League of Legends’ story forward in 2020 and how Sett’s upcoming release will herald a few different things for Ionia such as in the Zed comics.
For comics, Ghostcrawler talked about the Riot-Marvel partnership, tremendous fan response for the Ashe and Lux comics, ongoing plans for Zed, and teased that Ekko would be getting a comic next in addition to his Convergence platformer game. Furthermore, he expanded on Arcane, Riot Games’ first animated series, which will show the history of presumably Vi and Jinx growing up in the slums between Piltover and Zaun. Additionally, players received another look at Riot Forge which will produce third-party games heavy in lore like the Ruined King RPG, but also Riot’s Table-Top team exploring different games which could be played in-universe such as Tellstones, a two-player bluffing game.
However, Ghostcrawler’s biggest announcement was Tales of Runeterra. These will be short videos that take players throughout Runeterra’s different regions, allowing them to see the interactions between iconic League of Legends champions and even characters from the upcoming Legends of Runeterra card game. The announcement ended with a sneak peek of the Ionian video featuring Shen and Akali in a brief discussion before shifting into a battle with a stone monster.
With Tales of Runeterra, Riot Games is ready to give players more lore in cinematic quality that previously came out only once or twice a year. On that note, hopefully Ionia is further fleshed out since the region has been previously defined by its Noxian invasion even in retconned lore.
In the end, 2020 seems like a great year to be a League of Legends player, but there may be some fans uninterested in the newest announcements. For those individuals, there are still other 2020 projects to look forward to like mobile and console versions of League of Legends.
League of Legends is available on PC.
