League Of Legends: Wild Rift Open Beta Is Finally Coming To North America
To kick off the eleventh competitive season of League of Legends, officially titled Season 2021, Riot Games streamed a series of League of Legends-related announcements on the morning of Jan. 8. Among these were a number of new details about the North American release of League of Legends: Wild Rift, the MOBA version of League of Legends first announced back in Oct. 2019.
All of the new information revealed during Riot's recent livestream was then collected in a thread shared to the official Wild Rift Twitter account. First and arguably foremost, Riot announced that Wild Rift will likely be playable in the Americas in March of this year.
Wild Rift has already been made available to much of the rest of the world. Most recently, it was opened up to players in Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia, following an initial release in Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Its first competitive season began on Jan. 8, meaning that players in the Americas will soon have a chance to join in, should this planned March release be met. Though it's fully playable, Wild Rift is technically still in its open beta period. A date for its full release has yet to be determined.
Riot has also detailed the current and future roster of champions available in Wild Rift. As of now, the game includes about 50 different champions (the original PC League features over 140). However, Riot plans to bolster that number by adding in an average of two champions per month.
That said, some champions function differently in Wild Rift than their counterparts in the PC edition of League of Legends. The Season 2021 kickoff livestream, for example, detailed changes being made to the mobile versions of Katarina and Rammus, both of whom are scheduled to be added into the game later this year.
Additional Wild Rift announcements include the ongoing development of a mobile All Random All Mid (or ARAM) mode, a system to provide players with additional input into which position they play in a given match, and two upcoming special events.
The latest news from Riot Games is that it is working on an MMORPG set in its Runeterra universe. This is set to join card game Legends of Runeterra, auto-battler Teamfight Tactics, single-player RPG Ruined King, and a yet-to-be-titled fighting game. These all share a Runeterra setting with League of Legends and of course its flagship mobile title, Wild Rift, now set to release in North American sometime in March.