It may not be League of Legends 2 (not yet, anyway), but Riot Games is confident it can now deliver a lot more “large, high-quality changes” to the long-standing MOBA after implementing several major technology upgrades.
These technology upgrades, which were first mentioned by leading League engineer Robin “Spawndog” Maddock on Nov. 22, now mean the Riot development team can work on things like the bumper-sized 2024 Rift update a lot quicker, and with far fewer issues popping up along the way.
While Spawndog didn’t go into details about what the technology upgrades are, the League developer did point to several past updates that should now be “much easier” for Riot to replicate in the future, including this year’s Soul Fighter event, the new League Arena game mode (and its 1.5 update), the long-awaited return of Nexus Blitz, and the Void-themed changes coming in 2024’s preseason.
“We’ve been investing extra heavily in tools, workflows, and map features this last year to make these kinds of changes easier,” he explained. “[There are] still lots of improvements to go but large, high-quality changes are becoming more feasible.”
I don’t know about you, but that gets me pretty excited about League’s future. We haven’t really got our hands on the new 2024 Rift update yet, nor any of the new items, but the hype is already hitting a fever pitch there. Plenty of my friends who had taken a step back from the ranked side in the last few years have already been messaging me about the preseason updates and wanting to play, and more sweeping changes in a similar vein could only skyrocket League even more.
Similarly, Arena and the Soul Fighter event have easily been two high marks of the 2023 season and more modes and events in that same vein can only be a good thing. Arena clearly took quite a lot of time tech-wise—look at how long it had to cook again after its first extremely popular run—so anything that shortens that development time just means we’ll hopefully see new, fresh playlists landing more frequently.
Riot isn’t finished working on things behind the scenes either. Spawndog teased the League development team will “accelerate development even more next year” and that should mean more upgrades and therefore more events, map changes, and modern additions for the decade-old game.
Maybe (if we dare to dream) League 2 could even be next up.
