League of Legends: Wild Rift’s open beta is now available for all players in Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand.
The regional open beta has been released on both Android and iOS. Players in these regions can download the game through the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store.
Related: Riot executive producer explains Wild Rift’s delay in North America, South America, and India
Yesterday, Wild Rift’s official Twitter account tweeted a message to mark the occasion. “This is one of the biggest milestones we’ve hit so far, and we’re excited to continue developing Wild Rift with all of you throughout the open beta,” Riot said.
Wild Rift was announced in October 2019 for Android, iOS, and consoles. The game is similar to League on PC with some key differences to make it optimized for mobile. The Summoner’s Rift map is smaller in Wild Rift since Riot wants to keep match times around 15 minutes. While Wild Rift’s champion pool is similar to PC, many of the champs have different abilities and mechanics to work better on the joystick control scheme.
Riot previously said it plans to release the mobile version by the end of 2020 with the console launch set for later in the future. The game has been delayed, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’ll be coming to Europe, Middle East, North Africa, Oceania, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, and Vietnam in December. For North America, South America, and India, Riot plans to release the game in the spring of 2021.
After being initially announced as a 2020 release on Android and iOS, Riot Games announced earlier this month that League of Legends: Wild Rift would be delayed until 2021 for players in North America, South America, and India. As expected, fans weren’t too happy about that.
Today, Wild Rift tweeted a message from Riot’s executive producer, Micheal Chow, for fans in those regions. Chow talked about the reasons that have caused this delay.
The main reason for Wild Rift’s delay is the COVID-19 pandemic, Chow said. He explained that the pandemic has left the team “grounded and unable to travel,” making it so they cannot follow usual procedure to launch new servers for other regions. The pandemic has also caused other “technical constraints and complicated each region’s own unique set of challenges and requirements.”
“It has become a much more complex and multi-faceted problem to bring service to your regions in particular,” Chow said. He added that rushing the game isn’t a solution because that could make players face a lot of problems and may require an entire reset of the game’s servers.
