Riot Games has had an incredibly busy year this 2020, and we’re only halfway through the year. This is especially considering that 2020 has objectively been one of the most insane, disruptive years on a world-wide scale that we’ve had in quite some time.
Still, Riot has pushed forward with their ambitious plans, continuing to add more and more features to League of Legends and flesh out their upcoming titles that they’ve worked towards, such as Valorant.
With so much on the table, they aren’t slowing down for anything. In their new announcement earlier, the developers laid out a Champion Roadmap and explained what their plans for the foreseeable future are.
“Even if you don’t pick them up yourself, seeing new champs in your games adds more to learn and master,” Riot writes in their announcement. “That being said, we think it’s important for all players to get at least one new champion in their role a year, that way they have something new to try and can maybe even add a new champ to their rotation.”
With such a goal in mind, Riot has committed themselves to try and release a minimum of six new champions a year. These champions are intended to fill one per role – support, mid, top, jungle, and ADC – with the exception of mid, which will get two per year.
— Riot Games (@riotgames) June 2, 2020
The reason that mid gets two while the rest get one is for the massive difference of roles that mid champs can fulfill. Mid is primarily populated by either mages or assassins, both of which play drastically differently. Riot intends to release one for each role.
“We may not always hit these goals,” Riot admits, “as we don’t want to push champions out that don’t meet our quality bar just to hit the target, but it’s what we’re aiming for starting in 2020.”
The most recent release of a champion came in January of this year with the primarily-top lane champion, Sett. Before him came Aphelios in mid-December of 2019. Since then, there’s been a bit of a drought.
Riot’s commitment will be interesting to watch, as six is incredibly ambitious for the developers. In the last three years – 2019, 2018, and 2017 – Riot released five, three, and five champions respectively.
Six is definitely a bit of a high bar for them to be setting, especially with the year already half over and five more to go. Still, it’s fantastic to see the developers looking forward so strongly, and given that they already admitted they may not be able to make the goal, all we can do is wait and see.
