League of Legends: Wild Rift launching in North America this March

League of Legends: Wild Rift design director Brian Feeney provides an overview of all the cool stuff coming to the mobile game this year.

Last year, Riot Games officially launched the beta for League of Legends: Wild Rift, the mobile version of its popular MOBA. Unfortunately, North America was left out of the first and second rounds of the regional beta.

But come March, those in North and South America will be able to jump into Wild Rift. Design director Brian Feeney didn’t give a specific date, but at least we now know what month we can look forward to.

Feeney also spoke more on some of the champions coming to Wild Rift and how the team decides whether or not to change a champion’s abilities. The goal for 2021 is to broaden the playable champion pool by adding at an average of two new champions every month.

Katarina

Coming later this year is Katarina, one of the highest skill-cap champs in the game. While Katarina’s abilities will remain largely the same as her PC counterpart, there was one change made with her ultimate that should make her even more fun to use on mobile.

“We only look to change their abilities if they don’t work on twin-stick controls or if there’s a cool opportunity to really make them shine. In this case, it’s both,” Feeney said, explaining that on mobile it was too easy to accidentally cancel her ult with the joystick.

Katarina’s ultimate, Death Lotus, still flings daggers all over the place; but, instead of being rooted in one place while ulting like on PC, she’ll be able to slowly move and reposition. The gameplay video of Katarina showed her slowly moving while ulting and it looks pretty awesome. I hope they bring this change to PC as well.

Rammus

Rammus is also rolling into Wild Rift later this year. Like Katarina, he’s also undergoing a slight redesign for mobile. To emphasize Rammus’ fantasy of “gotta go fast,” he now gains out of combat movement speed as he passively rolls across the map. His new ultimate, Soaring Slam, allows him to leap in the air and create tremors where he lands. The size of tremors are based on Powerball speed.

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Gameplay Improvements & ARAM

In addition to gameplay improvements, like an expanded item pool, Riot is working on an All Random, All Mid (aka ARAM) game mode for Wild Rift.

Looking to continue supporting ranked play, Riot is planning to add a ping reply system, which should help you more easily coordinate with a team and acknowledge their calls.

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