Viego Isn’t Ready for League of Legends: Wild Rift Yet

Viego has made quite an impression in League of Legends since he was added. The manaless, self-healing, champion-stealing character excels in lanes and in the jungle and has been a pick-or-ban champion in the competitive scene, so logic follows that he’d be similarly dominant whenever he comes to League of Legends: Wild Rift. That may be true, but we won’t know for sure since he’s not ready to come to the mobile version of League just yet.

Riot Games’ Wild Rift developers talked about Viego recently in a post detailing why, exactly, the Ruined King isn’t ready for Wild Rift right now. The problem centers around the champion’s passive ability, the one that allows him to temporarily take on the form, items, and abilities of a champion who he recently scored a takedown on. The Wild Rift team said the tech for that sort of possession ability in the mobile game isn’t established yet after the developers prioritized evolution and form-swapping tech for champions like Shyvana, Kai’sa, and Kha’Zix.

“Unfortunately, with Viego’s under-the-hood complexity, we realized we wouldn’t be able to get him up and running reliably on our current timeline,” said the post from Wild Rift’s Game Director Alan Moore and Communications Lead Ben Forbes. “The last thing we’d want is to release Viego only to disable him again and again to fix technical interactions with every other champ. Meanwhile, we’re releasing a lot of other new champions in Wild Rift in 2021 and 2022! So, we made the decision very late in his development to icebox his release for now.”

“This sucks,” Riot said about the decision, a sentiment likely to be echoed by all the Viego mains abusing the champion right now in the PC version of League. But just as Viego’s story continues in League and other games from Riot during the Sentinels of Light campaign, Viego’s Wild Rift story isn’t over yet either. Riot said it plans to release Viego once Wild Rift can handle the Ruined King.

“We intend to release Viego one day when we’ve made our supporting tech more robust, as his gameplay is really engaging and he’s fast becoming an important character to Runeterra’s overall plot,” the post said. “Viego represents a milestone for our team at which our underlying infrastructure is able to handle his level of complexity—we have every intention of making and releasing Viego at a later date, treating it as the bar of excellence that we need to hit in terms of our development capabilities.”