Legends of Runeterra director Andrew Yip tells us first hand about the more immediate future of the Riot Games card game.
Last Wednesday we had a digital appointment, as has been common in recent times due to the coronavirus crisis, with Andrew Yip, director of Legends of Runeterra, in which it was clear that the launch of the final version and on mobile, makes already a few weeks, it was only the beginning. Yip not only spoke at length about the future plans in the short term, for the next three months, but also answered all the questions from the media present, among which we were, about design decisions, model of business, what comes to Legends of Runeterra -which is not exactly little-, etc …
Short-term roadmap: modes, charts and regions
Yip detailed the Legends of Runeterra roadmap until next August, which may seem like a short time, but enough for the Riot Games team to add a surprising amount of content. The most immediate thing is to talk about the month of June, when the first new game mode arrives, Gauntlets, which, like Expeditions, will grant a dose of unpredictability to the creation of decks, breaking out of the metagame routine of qualifying games. This new mode will be available in a timely manner, arriving the first on June 26, and each one will have specific rules when creating our deck to compete, rotating every weekend. For example, the former will use conventional rules; the second is the singleton format, according to which only one copy of each letter can be included, and so on. As in the aforementioned Expeditions, the objective will be to reach seven victories to achieve the maximum prize.
Legends of Runeterra
Who is a player, regular or not, of League of Legends, will know how to anticipate the operation of the Events, which will debut in July, since they basically follow the same formula. It will be monetized through a Battle Pass, a system already adopted as usual in most multiplayer titles, and it will come with cosmetic elements such as boards, guardians or reverses, as well as missions with a certain time to complete. Each Event will have a specific theme, the first being still a mystery to be unraveled.
Just a month later, in July, the Laboratories will arrive, which, as its name suggests, is an even more experimental game mode with drastic changes in game mechanics, and which makes a more casual approach to Legends of Runeterra . The first will arrive on the 8th of that month, with "unusual teams of Champions, unpredictable strategies and a quick start to action, to give players and developers the most extreme experiences," according to Yip himself.
But Yip not only spoke of new modes, and it is that as in all worthwhile CCG -collectible card game-, and more in one based on the rich lore of League of Legends, new cards will come to the game with remarkable frequency: every two months, adding a new region every six, that is, twice a year. In this way, the next region will arrive in August, adding new letters in October and December, assuring Yip that the new regions will be the focal point of each new content launch. Obviously, the arrival of new cards leads to the debate about a future separation, when there is a massive amount of them, between you, a little like in Hearthstone with the Wild and Standard, but that is something inherent to the genre. According to Yip, there is still nothing decided but it is a topic that is on the table with so much content to come, although the letters "eliminated" from the competitive format would not have to be chosen according to a criterion of age, but also of competitiveness . What he could specify is that, in case of implementing card rotations, they will give full support to a hypothetical format in which all the cards are present, and that if they occur, it will not be until next year at the earliest.
This brings us to a question, and how do you get all those cards without having to wait until Tuesday to open our Weekly Box, or spend all of our jokers at once to craft them. As Yip stated, the Events we were talking about before will be a good way to get new cards, since the daily rewards will only return for logging in for a limited time, but they also plan a general improvement for the in-game store, even raising the possibility of putting complete decks up for sale.
Frequent updates with different improvements
He also wanted to detail some general improvements that will come soon. One of them concerns the maximum rank, Master, since they want to give players more incentives to continue playing once they have reached it. According to him, those who get to Master feel that they have more to lose than gain, which makes it difficult for them to find incentives to continue, something that they obviously want to change. This feature, which is yet to be detailed how it will be carried out, will arrive with patch 1.4 and will coincide with the premiere of the new competitive season. Another aspect that recognized that it should improve, and will do so later this year, is the deck editor, which they want to make more intuitive and even add aesthetic elements, something that will also affect the cards, which will receive modifications in their art, a bit like the golden cards in other card games, based on the example he mentioned himself.
Other features he announced to complete a well-loaded 2020 year are online rankings, player profiles, and a spectator mode. Likewise, he assured that they are in development, without specifying when they will arrive although it is expected that we will already talk about 2021, it is a Tournament mode and experiences for a player of which too many details are not yet known. The latter is something we asked Jeff Jew, executive producer of LoR, at the time, and he was very open, knowing that there is a lore behind the Champions that many players are unaware of by not playing League of Legends. In fact, as Yip later confirmed to an Italian companion in Question Time, a Story Mode or similar is something that is most demanded by Legends of Runeterra players, since players want to know this lore, or also deepen it if they already play Riot's MOBA. That said, he also recognized that although starting from this pre-established lore facilitates some things, it also complicates many others, and that is that "it meant many headaches to think what exactly the players expected from each Champion".
In short, the short term of Legends of Runeterra is overwhelming in terms of content, since in addition to the new cards and regions that will be added to let fresh air into the metagame, the different game modes will represent a good way to evade us as well of the usual tension of the qualifying games. As we said at the beginning, the first date will be the Gauntlets, brand new this imminent month of June, of which we will give a good account to tell you absolutely everything in the magazine.
