At the end of last year, Riot Games announced an effort to expand the League of Legends IP beyond its MOBA roots. Acquiring and partnering with several third-party studios, Riot Games’ new initiative for its 10th anniversary has spawned a League of Legends fighting game, a popular FPS called Valorant, a collectible card game called Legends of Runeterra, and even a business/management sim for LoL esports. The League of Legends universe will soon reach far beyond the base game into a ton of new gaming experiences, a sentiment that Respawn Entertainment recently expressed with the hit battle royale Apex Legends as well.
Lore continues to expand and grow alongside the popularity of Apex Legends, which still boasts several million active players and is consistently a top 20 game on Twitch. With each new character and season has come new cinematics and lore entries detailing the world of the popular battle royale title. Now, Respawn Entertainment and EA have the opportunity to potentially expand the Apex Legends world outward into various other gameplay experiences. There’s enough lore and background material that could make a similar expansion plan feasible, but it’s unclear if Apex Legends‘ lore has as much staying power as League of Legends does.
League of Legends‘ expansion was emphasized earlier this week with a new cinematic story trailer for Ruined King: A League of Legends Story. Alongside the other untitled projects that Riot Games announced last year, Ruined King will be a single-player RPG set in the League of Legends universe. Players will add several iconic characters from the base game (Miss Fortune, Ahri, Illaoi, Yasuo, Braum, and Pyke) into their party as they explore the Shadow Isles. Slated to release early next year, it’s the first of several ambitious projects set in the League of Legends universe to expand the story of Riot Games’ now-iconic MOBA.
Ruined King comes alongside several spin-offs and untitled projects currently in the works. The League of Legends fighting game, called “Project L,” is currently in development under Radiant Entertainment, a first party studio run by EVO founders Tom and Tony Cannon that Riot Games acquired way back in 2016. Riot Games’ first-person shooter, codenamed “Project A,” became the immensely popular Valorant multiplayer shooter. Legends of Runeterra, the official League of Legends card game, is now available to play on mobile devices and PC.
While League of Legends continues to grow outside the MOBA, it seems Apex Legends shares a similar desire to grow outside of its own battle royale genre. In an interview with Eurogamer, Apex Legends game director Chad Grenier mentioned a desire to expand and “eventually evolve into something beyond a battle royale.” At first, Grenier mentions that crossplay and the Nintendo Switch release of Apex Legends are the first steps to expanding the game. However, Grenier subsequently poses the question of how Apex Legends could move beyond just iterating on Apex Legends with additional limited-time-modes.
Considering Apex Legends takes place within the larger Titanfall universe, there’s already plenty of lore for expanded games to draw from. With the IMC/Milita conflict chronologically occurring decades before the events of Apex Legends, a lot has already happened. It is possible additional spin-offs could return with another Titanfall game, whether it’s a prequel or sequel, to detail further events of the Frontier War. There’s also plenty of potential in the Apex Legends storyline, outside of the battle royale’s existing lore. Character-specific stories like a stealth-oriented/Hitman-style game for Revenant, or perhaps a single-player first-person shooter detailing Bangalore’s time with the IMC Armed Forces, these could certainly do well for Apex Legends fans in the right context.
It’s really up to the Apex Legends to determine whether or not the battle royale has the same staying power as League of Legends does. League of Legends has been around for over 10 years, and still remains one of the biggest MOBAs and esports games of all time. In comparison, Apex Legends is a far younger game that released a year and a half ago. Granted, if the Titanfall games are looped in, then the overarching Apex Legends–Titanfall universe has been around for six years. That’s still comparatively a short time, which means asking if Apex Legends has the same character reputation as League of Legends is a valid question, at least when strictly talking about spin-offs.
Perhaps it’d be interesting to see how the Apex Legends community responds to the idea of spin-off titles, and whether it’d be a worthy venture for Respawn Entertainment and/or EA. At a glance, Apex Legends and Titanfall bring enough to the table lore-wise for this to be absolutely possible, but it’s a matter of gauging whether the interest is there. Somehow mixing the whimsical nature of Apex Legends‘ lore with the seriousness of Titanfall could be an interesting experiment.
Who’s to say League of Legends players are going to come out in droves for Ruined King? Plenty of players have jumped on the Valorant train, but that’s not exactly a direct correlation to League of Legends‘ success. Apex Legends could certainly try it, but don’t expect Respawn Entertainment to announce six different spin-off games like Riot Games did.
Apex Legends is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. The Nintendo Switch version has been delayed to 2021.
![\"IT電腦補習](\"http://itteacheritfreelance.hk/test/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo2-2.png\"){kind=logo}
www.itsec.hk
www.itsec.vip
www.itseceu.uk
Leave a Reply