League of Legends: Wild Rift Update Shows Off New Gameplay

Riot Games has been quiet on League of Legends: Wild Rift lately as it said it would be after initially announcing the console and mobile version of League of Legends last year, but it's returned this week for a brief update on the status of the upcoming game. This video update clued players into what Riot's currently working on in Wild Rift and also showed off some new gameplay. The gameplay showed what different champions would look like in the new version of League and also showed how some of the champions' abilities would be adjusted to better fit the new format.

The video update above was shared by Riot this week where Brian "Riot FeralPony" Feeney, the design lead on Wild Rift, provided the latest on the game. Feeney said the current efforts of Riot's Wild Rift team are focused on champion design. While many of the champions will be nearly identical to how they play on the PC version, Feeney said some of them had to be adjusted to better fit in Wild Rift.

We've seen some examples of those changes before in gameplay previews where Ashe was able to direct her ultimate after it was used. Some more examples were shown in the video above including changes for Vayne, Twisted Fate, Annie, Miss Fortune, and Lux.

For the first two champions, the changes make their passives more active. This means that players have more control over when they use the champions' passives since both Twisted Fate and Vayne have passive effects that typically activate on their own once certain requirements are met. Vayne's Silver Bolts ability, for example, can be activated to grant a burst of movement speed.

For Annie and Miss Fortune and likely other champions who have point-and-click abilities, Riot said that the moves didn't work quite as well when using a dual-thumbstick control scheme as opposed to what's possible when using a mouse. To remedy this, it appears as though some of those abilities have been converted to skillshots instead. Feeney pointed out that this can create some unique scenarios like Miss Fortune bouncing her Q off an enemy in the fog of war and onto whoever is behind them.

As for Lux, and perhaps others, her ultimate now has much greater range. The Lux ultimate shown in the video saw Lux blasting a Fiora from the bottom lane while the duelist was in the top lane.

Wild Rift still doesn't have a release date, so expect to see more updates like this one before a date is officially announced.