League of Legends: Wild Rift is entering open beta in Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea on Oct. 27, Riot Games announced today. While this is good news for fans eagerly awaiting the game’s release, players in the Americas may have to wait a bit longer to play the game.
Michael “Riot Paladin” Chow, Riot’s executive producer of Wild Rift, revealed that the game will be expanding to other regions in the next “few months.” The game will be coming to Europe, Oceania, Vietnam, and Taiwan in December. For the Americas, however, Riot plans to release Wild Rift during the spring of 2021.
This will certainly be disappointing for League fans in North and South America who wanted to play the MOBA on Android and iOS. Last year, Riot announced that it planned on getting the game to most regions around the world by 2021. With today’s announcement, it seems like that goal should be achieved.
Wild Rift is a toned-down version of League for PC on Android and iOS devices. The size of Summoner’s Rift has been decreased to offer shorter game times. Many of the champions have been reworked to be optimized for the joystick controls on mobile. Riot has also said that Wild Rift will be coming to consoles in the future. More details about this will be revealed in late 2020, the developers previously said.
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It was also announced today that a popular jungler from the PC version of League is coming to Wild Rift. Lee Sin will be available in the game through a new patch coming later this month. The champion has been optimized for mobile-friendly controls.
Riot Games started 2020 with a bang by announcing multiple new projects, including a mobile port of League of Legends. Calling it a port would be an understatement, however, since Riot went ahead and redesigned Wild Rift from scratch so it’d perform smoothly on mobile platforms.
Though the developer was aiming for a 2020 release, the COVID-19 outbreak caused changes in Wild Rift’s release schedule. Select regions have been getting a taste of it so far, with more being added later on. The increase in the areas participating in the beta means that the game is close to having a full release, but there are still bugs that Riot needs to tackle before making Wild Rift commercially available.
This isn’t holding the developer back from marketing possibly the most fleshed-out MOBA game available on mobile devices, however. Wild Rift was featured on a segment covering gaming in Apple’s Oct. 13 event and demonstrated how powerful iPhone 12’s chipset, A14, is.