It's about time! Riot Games has added promotion for Legends of Runeterra inside of the League of Legends client.
Too little too late? With Legends of Runeterra now being a part of League Studios after they have decided to stop focusing on the PVP side of the game and fully embracing PVE with the Path of Champions, it will be interesting to see what a larger audience for the game will mean. If, and it's a major if, Riot can manage to build up a strong playerbase for the game with it being right in everyone's face when they are trying to hop into a game on Summoner's Rift, revisiting PVP is always possible.
With that said, not all card games need to have a PVP focus; Strategy in itself is fun! Riot certainly doesn't have any plans for new sets in the short-term though with their recent announcemcents after the lastest expansion, Dreamlit Paths, was launched which indicates that we'll just see card rotations every few months as they roll over new ranked gameplay seasons. Of course, if they see an increase in demand for PVP and people are playing it consistently over the next few seasons, it wouldn't surprise us to see more resources go into adding new cards to the game, even if Path of Champions ends up remaining the major focus.
The real question is, how long until Legends of Runeterra just becomes a true part of the League client, much like Teamfight Tactics is today? Probably won't happen due to different engines powering them, it would require a major UI overhaul, but it sure would be interesting! It would make the League client more of a games platform than Blizzard's Hearthstone tried to do, with Hearthstone instead removing new types of games like Duels and stopping development entirely on Mercenaries.
If you haven't had an opportunity to check out Legends of Runeterra, or you're looking to jump back into it, you can download the game on the official website. Check out Riot's announcement video of the button down below.
Comments
To be honest, they were even worse at balancing LoR than Blizzard is at balancing Hearthstone. Additionally, they were WAY too generous with the rewards, so it was extremely easy to play for free. That's why the free-to-play model sucks -- it's too hard to balance greed (which will drive away players sooner or later) vs. making enough money to stay afloat in the long term.
On the bright side, Path of Champions is by far the best deckbuilding roguelike I've ever played. The in-game progression is extremely strategic, and the meta-progression is very satisfying. You get regular incremental improvements that feel meaningful when you level up, but also huge leaps and bounds in power as you add stars to each Champion.There are dozens and dozens of Champions to collect, so replayability is high.
It's probably still too easy to play for free, but maybe they'll figure that out before it's too late.
Now that's great, instead of investing on a bigger playerbase on the great moments of the game, they waited for the playerbase to drop to a minimum to put the game out there.
Not trying to be negative, but what took them so long?
Yeah it doesn't make a lot of sense they were so afraid to advertise the game early on. You gotta wonder if it was a huge learning thing for them and if they won't make the same mistake next time around